Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject American Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1, University of Frankfurt (Main), course: Historical Linguistics, language: English, abstract: Languages have always been in contact with other languages. Much has been written about language contact among Indo-European languages. Thus, this paper aims to shed some light in the direction of a so-called exotic language: Japanese. For many it is still a language considered to be unaffected by outer influences due to its grammatical complexity and geographical origin. But quite the opposite is the case. Japanese culture and language comprise an abundance of English or foreign expressions respectively which gives rise to take a closer look, first of all what borrowing means in theory, and then how this can be applied on the subject of Japanese borrowings in particular, in terms of how much is borrowed, especially from the English language, and how the borrowings are integrated into the native Japanese language system.