Ubiquitous variability in the phonological form of loanwords: Tracing early borrowings into Japanese over five centuries of contact

Within the field of Loanword Phonology, the issue of diachronic change and social variation has only recently begun to be addressed. With respect to diachronic change, Kang (2010) argues that the driving forces in loanword adaptation can evolve over time, with early adaptation being primarily perceptually-driven and later adaptation involving more categorical mappings at the abstract/systemic level. With respect to social variation, Crawford (2009) argues convincingly that the loanword borrowing should be broken into two independent stages: [1] the initial adaptation of the word by the first generation speakers (who may be in direct contact with the source-language speakers) and [2] the subsequent process of transmission of the adapted word-forms throughout the borrowing community (even after contact has ceased). Crawford (2009) also models how multiple variant forms of the same loanword can coexist and compete with each other until a particular form ultimately emerges as 'dominant' within the community. This account makes the strong prediction that, in the early stages of language contact, there should be pervasive variability in the phonological form of loanwords. However, Paradis & LaCharité (2008) claim that borrowings during early contact are just as categorical as in the modern language, with only a slight difference in variability between the two. However, it is possible that this finding is merely an artefact of the fact that only a single data-source was used to represent the early-contact period. In order to get a richer (and more realistic) picture of the full scope of variation at each time point, multiple data sources must be triangulated.