Japanese has three major script types, kanji, hiragana, and katakana: kanji are a set of Chinese logographic scripts, and both hiragana and katakana are phonetic syllabaries. Although many observers have commented that words written in katakana are increasing in Japanese writings, there is little empirical data to prove it. This book provides evidence of their increase as well as capturing the differences in katakana usage between different publication outlets, namely, maga-zines and newspapers as well as television commercials. The increase of katakana words in Japanese writings poses a...