"Are": Japanese word of the year
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Japanese words of the year are always exciting and surprising, but this year's takes the cake.
are あれ
pronunciation
-
- IPA: [a̠ɾe̞]
distal demonstrative, something far off removed from both speaker and listener: that, yon
-
- (deictically) that one over there (far from the speaker and the addressee)
- あれはなんですか？
- Are wa nan desu ka?
- What is that?
- あれはなんですか？
- (anaphorically) that one we both know (both the speaker and the addressee know)
- これはあれでしょ？○○。
- Kore wa are desho?○○.
- This is that one thing, isn't it? You know, X.
- これはあれでしょ？○○。
- (deictically) that one over there (far from the speaker and the addressee)
Usage note
-
- Indicates something far off, removed from both speaker and addressee. Contrast with それ (sore), indicating something removed from the speaker but closer to the addressee.
What's truly amazing about "are" is all of the "nuances" (perhaps my favorite Japanese loanword!) it embraces. The Japanese are distinguished for their subtlety, and that's what this "are" ("that" — the unnamed) is all about.
Such a common, quotidian, short expression is Japanese word of the year! 2 kana, 3 letters.
That “Are” Thing Named Word of the Year in Japan for 2023
Language nippon.com (Dec 1, 2023)
The word are (“that thing”), a catchphrase used by the Hanshin Tigers as they won their first central League title in 18 years and first Japan Series championship since 1985, is Japan’s word of the year for 2023.
—–
On December 1, the publisher Jiyū Kokumin Sha announced the 10 finalists for the words of the year for 2023, along with the winning term. Coming out on top this year was are (アレ), meaning “that thing” (the Central League championship that manager Okada Akinobu wanted to avoid mentioning by name) and also used as an acronym for “Aim, Respect, Empower,” a slogan used by the Hanshin Tigers baseball squad as they powered their way to their first Japan Series win since 1985.
It is remarkable that the Japanese word of the year — in such short compass — could imply so many shades of meaning.
Other finalists
新しい学校のリーダーズ／首振りダンス — Atarashii gakkō no rīdāzu/Kubifuri dansu. The musical group Atarashii Gakkō no Leaders, four young women dressed in school uniforms, styled themselves as the “representatives of Japanese youth” this year. In the music video for the 2023 “Otona Blue,” the Atarashii Gakkō members display the “head-bobbing dance” move that earned them significant fame on TikTok and helped catapult them to domestic fame after they had already made a splash in international markets.
Watch these "New School Leaders" doing their "Bobbling Dance" in this wild video. I could not help but compare them to all of those K-pop girl groups, hyper-manicured, exquisitely choreographed. This Japanese group is raw exuberance and whacky enthusiasm, constituting almost a not-made-up critique of the perfectionist Korean singer-dancers. The Japanese girls are still "come hither", but imbued with irony.
The next buzzword of the year also attests to Japanese Rabelaisian wit:
OSO18／アーバンベア — OSO18/Āban bea. A male brown bear codenamed OSO18 was responsible for 66 attacks on cattle in Hokkaidō from 2019 to June 2023, when it was shot to death. The elusive aggressor was even hard to capture on video for most of that period. Meanwhile, the increasing appearances of the animals in built-up areas has led to more use of the term “urban bears.”
Attesting to a sometimes bizarre streak in Japanese character is:
蛙化現象 — Kaeruka genshō. The “turning into a frog phenomenon” is a phrase that originated in a psychology paper, detailing how a long-term romantic crush can suddenly cool off the moment the other shows an interest. It is a negative play on the happy transformation seen in the fairy tale “The Frog Prince.” In a twist on the original meaning, the phrase took off this year among young people to describe how, for example, minor quirks of behavior in a partner can lead to an instant loss of attraction.
Possessed of the same fascination and angst that it is having abroad is:
生成AI — Seisei AI. This year saw the release of a succession of tools that can create, for example, text and images based on learning from models. This “generative AI” sparked much talk in Japan, as elsewhere in the world.
More to come on the AI score here at Language Log.
Japan Times also put out a list of buzzwords of the year and are topped it too:
Japan’s 2023 buzzword of the year is all about winning
Naturally, there were several overlaps with the nippon.com list (see above), but they were described / defined rather differently on the Japan Times list:
“kaerukagenshō” ("getting the ick”), poked fun at the awkward dissonance many felt after coming back to in-person, maskless interactions. The term describes the phenomenon of instantly losing feelings for someone after witnessing a certain habit or action.
and
“yami baito” (“dark part-time jobs")
which derives from yami やみ 闇 ("dark") + German Arbeit ("work") > arubaito and refers to one-off jobs that involve crimes like robbery or fraud that young people get tricked into, not more respectable part-time employment like pushing people onto crowded, "rasshuawā ラッシュアワー" trains.
Read more about all 30 words that were nominated to be this year’s top buzzword.
Lots of fun.
Selected readings
- "Kanji of the year 2022: war" (12/13/22)
- "Hurry hurry super scurry" (12/17/22)
[Thanks to Don Keyser]
Cervantes said,
December 2, 2023 @ 10:06 am
Spanish has a similar distinction, though probably not as complex. Aquel means "that" referring to something that is distant from both the speaker and interlocutor. Eso refers to something tht is close to the interlocutor. As in English, something close to the speaker has its own demonstrative pronoun, esto = this. (I'm not presenting the distinctions of gender and number for these words. These are all masculine singular forms.)
Terry K. said,
December 2, 2023 @ 10:46 am
Actually, eso and esto in Spanish are the neuter, used when there's no noun to agree with. The masculine singular forms are ese and este. (Aquel is indeed the masculine singular, with aquello being the neuter.)
Cervantes said,
December 2, 2023 @ 11:25 am
Actually Terry that's imprecise. If you are referring to something which has a feminine noun, but the noun has already been mentioned, so you don't need to say it again, you will say esa or esta. The noun is there implicitly. But I should have said este and ese for the masculine, yes.
Terry K. said,
December 2, 2023 @ 12:18 pm
Which is exactly what I meant and does match what I said.
Victor Mair said,
December 2, 2023 @ 5:00 pm
When I lived in Nepal (1965-67), I learned the expression "u para", which means "over there". If you want to say "over there, but not too far away", you just say "u para". If you want to say "over ther,, medium distance away", you say "uuuu para". If you want to say something is "over there, quite far away", you say "uuuuuuu para".
Christian Horn said,
December 2, 2023 @ 5:33 pm
are/あれ is do daily and common, I would not have considered it as a 'word of the year'.
Hiroshi Kumamoto said,
December 2, 2023 @ 7:46 pm
In the sports news it's been translated as "You know what", matching the second definition of the Wictionary quoted above.
Lucas Christopoulos said,
December 2, 2023 @ 7:48 pm
Here they chose the "今年の漢字 " in Kiyomizudera Temple Kyoto, on December 12.
Last year (2022) it was "戦"
Michael Watts said,
December 2, 2023 @ 10:45 pm
@Terry K.
I'm confused how there can ever be "no noun to agree with" if we stipulate that a noun that is present in the context, but not in the sentence, will trigger agreement. Whenever I refer to "this" or "that", I have something in mind. Why would agreement not be triggered?
Michael Watts said,
December 3, 2023 @ 3:57 am
Are あれ is not written in kanji and therefore shouldn't be able to win Kanji of the Year. According to the linked coverage, it won "2023年の新語", where 新語 means "neologism". あれ isn't that either, so it's not clear what's going on.
Philip Taylor said,
December 3, 2023 @ 6:10 am
Are the "u"s in "uuuu para" and "uuuuuuu para" syllabic, Victor ?
Victor Mair said,
December 3, 2023 @ 6:16 am
Good question, Philip.
They represent extension / lengthening / prolongations, not additional syllabification.
Chris Button said,
December 3, 2023 @ 9:15 am
Does this encompass the interjection "are" as well?
Michael Watts said,
December 3, 2023 @ 11:57 am
Speaking of prosodic prolongation!
I observe that native Chinese will represent a longer 啊 particle at the end of a sentence by writing the character more than once.
This is not problematic since the particle is pronounced /a/; syllables of this form can run into each other seamlessly.
I suspect but have not directly observed that a similar thing might happen with particles that are contractions with 啊, so you might see 啦啊啊 or 哒啊.
I am pretty sure that prolongation can also happen, in the spoken language, to words that are not sentence-final particles. For example, I watched a Chinese television show in which one character's whiny wife pronounced 裙子 qunzi in a way that seemed to me to prolong the first syllable. Emphasis was being given to the word.
My question is: I don't see that the Chinese writing system can actually support indicating prolongation for a syllable such as 裙 qun. The minimum possible grapheme is the full syllable 裙, which in this case includes an onset, a diphthong, and a syllable-final consonant. 裙裙裙裙 does not suggest one long syllable; it suggests four separate syllables.
Is there a standard way to indicate prolongation in written Chinese?
Terry K. said,
December 3, 2023 @ 3:02 pm
@Michael Watts
Two situations where there's no noun for a demonstrative pronoun to agree with.
One, when asking what something is: What's that? ¿Qué es esto?
If the speaker doesn't have a noun to label something with, and if it doesn't have biological gender, then there's no gender to agree with.
Also, when referring to a story, or an idea someone expressed, or such.
For example:
Bob's coming to the party tomorrow. At least that's what he told me.
Bob vendrá a la fiesta mañana. Al menos eso es lo que me dijo.
Yes, " a noun that is present in the context, but not in the sentence, will trigger agreement". But sometimes there is just no noun present in the context.
Tom Dawkes said,
December 3, 2023 @ 4:12 pm
An Italian comparison: deictic adjectives show a triple distinction. —
QUESTO indicates a person or thing close to the speaker;
CODESTO indicates a person or thing far from the speaker but close to the listener;
QUELLO indicates a person or thing distant from the speaker and the listener.
In fact CODESTO has become confined to official style everywhere except in Tuscany, where it is still current in colloquial style: my daughter now lives in Tuscany and is married to a local man, and I heard her sister-in-law use CODESTO at lunch one day, and I asked her about it.
Michael Watts said,
December 4, 2023 @ 3:14 am
Here there clearly is a noun not just in the context but realized in the sentence. In the English sentence it is "what" and in the Spanish sentence it is "lo".
I see that Spanish wiktionary defines "lo" as the "masculine and neuter personal pronoun", so arguably it's not necessary to claim that there's nothing to agree with – lo is there and eso agrees with it.
This one is more interesting. The obvious noun to use would be "thing". There might also be more-specific-but-still-pretty-general terms that suggested themselves according to the nature of the object in question. Your sentence implies that nonbiological objects can never be referred to by gendered nouns, which is clearly untrue. (Because whenever the name of the object was coined, there would be no gender available to use for it.)
But although it can't be true that language in general works this way, it is a close match for how Latin works. Things that people say are generally referred to with the substantive participle dicta, ("[that] have been said") and I usually think of that as agreeing with the implicit noun verba ("words"), which is neuter. But other neuter substantives must have an implicit "thing(s)" supplied, and it isn't possible to view that usage as agreeing with the noun "thing", because that noun is female.
Terry K. said,
December 4, 2023 @ 10:53 am
I see that Spanish wiktionary defines "lo" as the "masculine and neuter personal pronoun", so arguably it's not necessary to claim that there's nothing to agree with – lo is there and eso agrees with it.
Do you realize that's circular? Yes, lo que and eso are both neuter and can be said to agree with each other. (Or I've seen them called neutral.) But there's still no noun they refer to. It's that Bob is coming to the party.
Anyway, a "lo que" clause is not required.
Bob no vendrá a la fiesta mañana. Eso no me gusta.
Bob's not coming to the party. I don't like that.
And no amount of logic about how you think language should or could work is going to change how Spanish actually does work.
Jonathan Smith said,
December 4, 2023 @ 5:37 pm
English also has this/that/it motivated by sentence wellformedness w/o any antecedent — "This is hard to explain", "That's me", "It's Monday", etc. It would be weird to insist that the sayer of these sentences has elided some particular noun like "situation", "person", "the day", etc.
Mandarin zhe4 这 / na4 那 require classifier [+ noun] — but appear alone just in certain situations resembling the above: "那是我" (in the photo), etc., suggesting "there is no noun"…
Michael Watts said,
December 5, 2023 @ 12:01 am
But Bob's coming to the party is a noun. Where the information is not provided paratactically, it will be provided in the form of a noun phrase. (In my phrasing, "Bob's coming to the party" is unambiguously headed by the noun coming; in yours, "that Bob is coming to the party" may be headless, but the phrase is still unambiguously a noun phrase.)
What else could it be? If you don't like something, or if someone tells you something, the thing in both cases is necessarily a noun. If it weren't a noun, it wouldn't be a "thing".
If pointing at a table and calling it "this" requires you to inflect "this" to agree with the table, why would pointing at a situation and calling it "this" not require you to inflect "this" to agree with the situation?
Or in other words, why are we saying that "there is no noun available in the context" and not saying that nouns of this form possess neuter gender?
Chris Button said,
December 5, 2023 @ 10:11 am
@ Michael Watts
Este and esta are used for masculine and feminine agreement in Spanish (and Portuguese for that matter) to mean "this" with an object. Esto (isto in Portuguese, although isso "that" is often used in the same way at least in Brazilian Portuguese) is used when the object is unspecified.
By the way, the "it" in "it rains" is a great one. Same problem in French with "il pleut" for example. What exactly is "it"? Spanish and Portuguese don't need to specify an "it", so can get away without using this dummy word.
Terry K. said,
December 5, 2023 @ 6:11 pm
@Michael Watts
Feel free to find another way to describe Spanish grammar if you don't link mine. The situation and grammar described is real.
But if you don't like the grammar itself, well, okay, but that doesn't change the language.
@Jonathan Smith
I appreciate the tidbit about Mandarin.
Terry K. said,
December 5, 2023 @ 6:18 pm
@Michael Watts.
Also, no, a thing is not a noun. A noun is a word that describes a thing. But the noun is not the thing.
And you can't inflect to agree with a situation because a situation does not have a gender. In the same way things don't have any inherent gender in a language with a masculine/feminine gender system, but (most) people do.
If you want to posit a neuter gender, I suppose you can (and these forms do go back to the Lain neuter, from what I've read), but it seems odd to do so when there are zero nouns with neuter gender.
Chris Button said,
December 6, 2023 @ 9:31 am
I do wonder why "are" (no object specified) gets word of the year while "ano" (object specified) doesn't. Perhaps because "are" seems more able to stand alone?
Yet it's also interesting that "are" as an interjection somewhat like "huh?" can stand alone in the same was as "ano" in "ano ne" as a filler word with a sense of "so .." or "you know …"