Sino-Japanese vocabulary

Sino-Japanese vocabulary, also known as kango (Japanese: 漢語, pronounced [kaŋɡo], "Han words"), is a subset of Japanese vocabulary that originated in Chinese or was created from elements borrowed from Chinese. Some grammatical structures and sentence patterns can also be identified as Sino-Japanese.

Kango is one of three broad categories into which the Japanese vocabulary is divided. The others are native Japanese vocabulary (yamato kotoba) and borrowings from other, mainly Western languages (gairaigo). It has been estimated that about 60% of the words contained in modern Japanese dictionaries are kango,^[1] and that about 18–20% of words used in common speech are kango.^[a] The usage of such kango words also increases in formal or literary contexts, and in expressions of abstract or complex ideas.^[2]

Kango, the use of Chinese-derived words in Japanese, is to be distinguished from kanbun, which is historical Literary Chinese written by Japanese in Japan. Both kango in modern Japanese and classical kanbun have Sino-xenic linguistic and phonetic elements also found in Korean and Vietnamese: that is, they are "Sino-foreign", meaning that they are not pure Chinese but have been mixed with the native languages of their respective nations. Such words invented in Japanese, often with novel meanings, are called wasei-kango. Many of them were created during the Meiji Restoration to translate non-Asian concepts and have been reborrowed into Chinese.

Kango is also to be distinguished from gairaigo of Chinese origin, namely words borrowed from modern Chinese dialects, some of which may be occasionally spelled with Chinese characters or kanji just like kango. For example, 北京 (Pekin, "Beijing") which was borrowed from a modern Chinese dialect, is not kango, whereas 北京 (Hokkyō, "Northern Capital", a name for Kyoto), which was created with Chinese elements, is kango.

Cite error: There are <ref group=lower-alpha> tags or {{efn}} templates on this page, but the references will not show without a {{reflist|group=lower-alpha}} template or {{notelist}} template (see the help page).