Why do apps like Spotify use ‘ホーム’ as a English loan word ‘Home’ rather than Kanji like ‘家’ etc?

7 comments

1. Commonly Katakana transliterations might be used over other words for

   (1) Stylistic reasons

   (2) To add a sense of “cool” or to be “trendy”

   (3) To stand out or be different

2. It boils down to how words are used. A homepage doesn’t carry with it the same ideas as a house in which to live, for example, so 家 doesn’t particularly make sense.

3. When you look up 家 in a dictionary it doesn’t appear to be a word that could be recognized as meaning the front page or starting point or hub. Even if we have a word in English that can be used more than one way, that doesn’t mean a similar word in another language is equally applicable.

4. Having 家 instead of ホーム _feels_ like English equivalent of using ”house” instead ”home” in the context of a home page. Linguistically maybe not exactly same, but that’s my feeling if I saw it used like that.

5. One thing I have learned through years of language study is that words which may ostensibly mean the same thing are rarely 1:1 translations of each other and will often developed different uses through the evolution of respective cultures. The use of home in English here is much more abstract than the Japanese word, which is much closer to the original meaning (a place in which you live), but since it’s use in English in this case is so widely used then it’s adoption as a loanword for this application is not surprising

6. This happens in many other languages as well as Japanese. Instead of saying “home” in whatever language the app is set to, some times it will use the English word.

   Like iphones used to have a “home button” – as I remember it, that was not translated to Danish in my grand parents Danish-language iphones, it would still be referred to as “home knappen” (the home button).

7. One thing worth noting is that it’s pretty common to see straight up “HOME” rather than “ホーム”