A Lexical Analysis of Contemporary Medical Terms in Japanese

Abstract

Medical terminology is an important subset to any language, and completely indispensable to oral and written communication in healthcare related professions. There is also a known divide between technical medical vocabulary used by medical professionals and general medical vocabulary that is easily understood by non-professionals and seen more frequently in everyday use. Though there has been a significant amount of research performed on its various aspects, to my knowledge no qualitative analysis has yet been performed on the vocabulary types present in medical terminology. The use of various vocabulary types are said to differ greatly in Japanese depending on context. Newspapers and academic writing are dominated by Sino-Japanese, daily conversation by native Japanese, while foreign loanwords can be found more frequently in women’s magazines1. The present study applies a framework of Japanese vocabulary types proposed by Yamaguchi (2007) onto medical vocabulary collected from Katei no Igaku (2000), a medical guidebook for home use.