"Welcome in!", part 2
« previous post | next post »
Entertaining article in Wall Street Journal (WSJ) by Joe Pinsker (5/30/25):
‘Welcome In.’ The Two-Word Greeting That’s Taking Over and Driving Shoppers Nuts.
The phrase has spread to coffee shops and credit unions, and customers are wondering why; ‘like a slap to the ear’
The first thing I have to say is that I'm amazed this article doesn't mention the Japanese greeting "Irasshaimase いらっしゃいませ", a phrase meaning "welcome" or "please come in". It's a polite greeting used to welcome customers when they enter a shop or restaurant in Japan.
Last September, we had a lengthy, vigorous discussion about the "welcome in" greeting sweeping southwest United States, including a deep look at its Japanese "Irasshaimase" heritage which we examined in 2021 (see "Selected readings" below).
Pinsker didn't do his homework. If he had, he certainly would have come across the Language Log post on "'Welcome in!'" (9/9/24) and its introduction to the Japanese phrase "Irasshaimase". A letter to the editor is in order.
Pinsker emphasizes that the phrase seems to have come out of nowhere. Never mind that there was an American television sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm that ran through 120 episodes in 12 seasons from October 15, 2000 to April 7, 2024. The 105th episode of the series (the 5th episode of the 11th season) was titled "IRRASHAIMASE" and features the leading actor's misuse of the Japanese expression.
Pinsker begins:
Welcome in, reader.
Not “welcome,” but “welcome in.” We’re delighted you stopped by. But are you? Or is that phrase highly annoying to you, like it is to Natasha Chernis of Los Angeles?
The 32-year-old software developer was perplexed when a retail worker first greeted her with “welcome in.”
“I just kind of stared at them because I thought they were going to finish the sentence with something else,” she said.
Then comes the confusion and perplexity:
Across the country, people are hearing “welcome in” at coffee shops, credit unions, yoga studios, dermatology clinics and convenience stores. The phrase has taken off in the 2020s, and customers say they are baffled by its sudden popularity. One reader wrote about their befuddlement in a letter last year to Miss Manners, who surmised the person who used it was probably confused.
“Anything new in language that people begin to notice is likely to attract the haters,” said Lars Hinrichs, a linguist in the University of Texas at Austin’s English department.
Speculation abounds on the origin of the phrase.
Here are some guesses:
Is it a homey Southern greeting that went national? A line from one corporate chain’s training manual that other businesses adopted? An awkward adaptation of “willkommen,” the German word for welcome?
None of those theories are backed by strong evidence, and tracing the roots of “welcome in” has proved to be elusive. Some wonder if it got a boost after Covid-19 closures, when businesses were welcoming customers back into physical spaces.
In general, American reactions to "welcome in" appear to be negative:
People started noticing, and complaining about, “welcome in” in the 2010s, particularly in stores, according to Grant Barrett, a lexicographer and co-host of the public-radio show “A Way with Words.” Barrett tracks mentions of certain phrases over time.
Barrett said “welcome in” evokes strong feelings because it draws attention to how interactions between businesses and customers differ from casual conversation.
“We get this weird, stilted language in a commercial exchange, like a waiter says to you, ‘What will we be having today?’” he said.
Tyler Jenich, a 42-year-old sommelier, has disliked “welcome in” since he first heard it a few years ago at the restaurant he works at in Venice, Calif. To him, it carried an off-putting faux warmth.
Myriad are the ways "welcome in" spread so rapidly:
Michaela Behymer started saying “welcome in” (at a normal volume) in the late 2010s after hearing her co-workers at a pizza chain use it.
“You could just say ‘welcome,’ but ‘welcome in’ is more like, ‘Please come in. We’re happy to see you—you are invited to this place,’” said Behymer, now 26 and a grant writer in Kansas City, Mo.
Paul E. Reed, a linguist at the University of Alabama, said the additional “in” deepens the sentiment, like the difference between “eating” something and “eating it up.”
Even though there were taverns and hotels with the punning name "Welcome Inn" in America during the 1800s, it never caught on as a ubiquitous phrase of greeting.
Pinsker cites many more reasons than those listed above why Americans tend to be turned off by "welcome in", whereas Japanese think that, if you don't say "irasshaimase いらっしゃいませ", you're being cold and impolite.
In my opinion, what we're seeing right now with "welcome in" is a clash of cultures. The better one will win, and that is as it's been throughout human history.
Welcome to the world, people.
Selected readings
- "'Welcome in!'" (9/9/24)
- "Irasshaimase?" (4/19/21)
- "Irasshaimase?, part 2" (11/10/21)
[Thanks to Mark Metcalf]
mdhughes said,
May 31, 2025 @ 4:28 pm
"Welcome in!" is a very common greeting from Twitch streamers to new viewers, especially in raids (everyone in a channel that's ending, goes to a channel chosen by the streamer). I'd expect most everyone under 30, and the gamer part of under 60, recognize "Welcome in!"
Bleeding over into IRL isn't surprising.
Tom said,
May 31, 2025 @ 4:41 pm
I suspect the origin of this greeting is some Southern dialect, as the article mentioning Texas suggests. (Interestingly, parts of Texas have Japanese diaspora populations.)
One thing very different from Japanese irasshaimase is that Japan has a tradition of greeting people who enter and leave. At home, people announce that they've arrived, and those at home acknowledge the arrival. On leaving, there is "kiwotsukete": take care! At work, there is "osaki ni shitsureshimasu", an apology for leaving before other people, and "otsukaresamadeshita", acknowledging the leaving person's daily accomplishment. "Okini" is Kansai dialect way of telling a leaving customer "thanks, and please come again". This culture is absent in the USA and so adopting just one aspect of it would be awkward.
There's also the issue of "genki"-ness. Irasshaimase demonstrates a level of atmospheric energy in a shop that is considered positive in Japan. Reading the atmosphere in this way isn't part of US consumer culture, which makes "welcome in" functionally different.
I saw a study once comparing Japanese and Southern American politeness in terms of their honor cultures, concluding that politeness persisted longer in cultures in which violence was an accepted way of settling slights. This seems strange in the modern Japanese context, but failing to show proper form does risk ostracization, a kind of social violence. Lack of irasshaimase makes the customer feel unsure about an intended slight and the subsequent avoidance of that shop is commercial ostracization, breakdown of the social fabric. This might make more sense to Southerners than Yankees.
KevinM said,
May 31, 2025 @ 4:50 pm
Oh, at my heart you are my darlin'
At my door you're welcome in
"East Virginia" (Carter Family version, 1934)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNHqF_OyFkk
JPL said,
May 31, 2025 @ 7:56 pm
What if the American within-the- store greeters were to say "Come on in!" to people who are already in or entering the store, as opposed to being outside the store and looking like they might want to come in? Would that be more comfortable and effectively welcoming for American shoppers than the "welcome in!" greeting that seems to put them off? And would that express part of the sentiment expressed in the Japanese greeting "irasshaimase"? And would the American "welcome" to people already in the store, a sentiment which is not explicitly expressed by "come in", express another part of the sentiment expressed (perhaps implicitly) by the Japanese expression?
Anthony said,
May 31, 2025 @ 10:15 pm
In Chicago I often pass by a small parking lot on a major thoroughfare. A sign, set back from the sidewalk by about 10 feet, proclaims "Warning to trespassers." If you're reading it on the public way, you're not a trespasser, so it doesn't apply to you. If you've walked past the sign, it's too late for a warning.
Jerry Packard said,
May 31, 2025 @ 11:50 pm
It may be a generalization from the perfectly acceptable ‘welcome aboard.’
martin schwartz said,
May 31, 2025 @ 11:54 pm
What drives me nuts is, e.g. upon my ordering a black coffee in a café or having sign and handing back a medical form,
the attendant exclaims. "Perfect!". Huh?
I haven't yet heard "Welcome in!", but it would bther me less,
if at all. Hmm, I see lots of "Welcome Inns" all over the Us, esp.
California1.
Philip Taylor said,
June 1, 2025 @ 5:07 am
Well, I would not regard "Perfect !" as inappropriate if I had handed in a completed medical form, and would interpret it as meaning "Well done, you have made none of the usual errors or omissions that most make when completing this form". As to [the] "Welcome Inn" we had one on the outskirts of Eltham (S.E. London) when I lived there as a child (i.e., 70+ years ago). See http://www.dover-kent.com/2015-project/Welcome-Inn-Eltham.html
Richard Hershberger said,
June 1, 2025 @ 5:47 am
I have not yet encountered "Welcome in!" and when I do I undoubtedly will be startled, then will recall this post. But what strikes me most about the WSJ piece is the dreary predictability of people getting into a lather because someone used a polite formula different from the polite formula the latherer prefers. This seems a needlessly stressful way to go through life.
Victor Mair said,
June 1, 2025 @ 6:31 am
"Have a good / great (rest of [your / the]) day" (2/11/23) — see especially in the comments for a vibrant discussion of "perfect"
"Pluperfect" (11/16/23)
David Marjanović said,
June 1, 2025 @ 6:53 am
That's what I thought immediately. There's no "come in!" in it – you've already come in, and now you're welcome in here.
GH said,
June 1, 2025 @ 7:58 am
Looking over the previous posts and discussions, I don't find anything to substantiate that the usage of this phrase in English derives from Japanese or has been popularized due to Japanese influence. It seems very likely to be a coincidence; English has long had phrases like "welcome back," "welcome aboard/on board," and "welcome home," so why not "welcome in"?
Victor Mair said,
June 1, 2025 @ 8:46 am
"seems very likely to be a coincidence" — always a good excuse when you can't explain a surprising phenomenon.
Your weak suppositions don't account in the slightest for the virality of "welcome in" at this particular juncture and in the locations where it is appearing, nor why it is annoying (at least puzzling) so many people.
If "welcome in" were just continuing some old traditions we already had, this novel greeting's explosive occurrence wouldn't be bothering so many people the way it manifestly is.
Plus you end your maundering with a question.
Grant Barrett said,
June 1, 2025 @ 9:14 am
It is the sighing situation of the quoted linguist that you spend a very large amount of time helping a journalist — as I did in this case — and then they give you three lines in the story. I spent more than 20 hours putting together a great deal of background about "welcome in" for Pinsker and talking to him about it on the phone and via email. I recognize that there is only so much room in the paper. I might have done more but I was stricken by Covid partway through am only now finding my equilibrium.
I will say he seemed to go into the topic with good faith, worked on the story for weeks, and it seemed to me like the story was going to be very different than the final product. As someone who worked for newspapers for a long time, if I had my guess, I would bet that this work was in the end savaged by an editor and reduced to its current state while Pinsker had to be held back by his colleagues for fear he would injure the editor.
I tried to dissuade him from the "people are complaining about this" angle but as you can see, it didn't take. It's just not a productive angle, ever, when talking about language. A lot more about the particulars of commercial language, which we talked about at length in our backgrounding, and a lot less about peeves, would have improved the article.
To address points by Victor and commenters above, with one main response that I often give to journalists who try to track the origin of language change: We don't have to figure out the reason for this change. Usually "we" (the specialists in the language community) don't ever really get to the bottom of such things. And that's fine. We like to try, because it's fun and we can avoid our other more important responsibilities (who doesn't like chore-dodging?), and we can go off on fanciful imaginings and wild hunts that our ordinary responsibilities might not require or permit, but in the end, knowing why "welcome in" seems to be surging isn't a big thing.
Agreed that there is insufficient evidence to support a foreign origin, neither Japanese nor German nor anything. There's simply no cultural transfer path for it, nor a citation trail. We'd need to see *both,* otherwise it's just speculation. The lexicographer in me demands the citation trail. The cultural transfer path would be some evidence in, say, weeabo culture or anime fandom that it had become a thing. I see nothing like that. I looked hard.
And nobody nowhere nohow seems to have taken a stab at looking a deeper corpora of evidence of similar verby phrases like "welcomed them into our home" (recognizing the different preposition) or "didn't feel welcome in the place" which are two related versions I came across recently.
Another response to comments above: if Southern US English is the origin, then why does the earlest evidence I find so often appear in the US West and Southwest? One of the nice things about hosting a national radio show is that listeners are kind of like fieldworkers. We save all of our email and voicemail and have it back to 2007. The voicemail is all converted programmatically with pretty good speech-to-text software. Many tens of thousands. So I have dozens of examples of people asking about "welcome in" for more than 20 years (with many delightful examples of the recency illusion, where they swear it only just started that year). Very, very few of those listener-provided examples come from the US South. Our show is heard on many stations in the US South, so it has good representation, and of course, there are always the podcast listeners, who are from everywhere. So if "welcome in" were particularly Southern, we would expect to find it strongly represented in our email and voicemail. (With all the usual caveats about crappy research methods inserted here. I know.)
What I do see suggested in the comments above that I *can* get on board is something else that I mentioned to Pinsker that didn't make it in the article, though I didn't think it would. And Victor may have to weigh in here (or has already in the previous blog posts about this; I only just now skimmed them for a refresher because it had been a while since I last read them). And that is that the "in" added to "welcome" is a remarkable instant change in the formality of "welcome" alone, adding a level of "remove" that so amazingly resembles some of what happens in Japanese that I am not all surprised we should look to that language and culture for a source. It is such a small thing that most non-specialist English-speakers would never believe that "welcome in!" is somehow more formal and more polite than "welcome!" One word? How? But I truly think that is the answer to why "welcome in!" use has increased: it's perhaps a multipath coinage (more than one coiner), latched on to and standardized by one or more corporate managements, spread formally and organically both because it fits the formality requirements of the odd commercial interaction, and here we are. No "One Great Coiner" origin story. No "One Great Coining Event" origin story, either.
Victor Mair said,
June 1, 2025 @ 9:45 am
Dōmo arigatō, Grant!
「Welcome In」問候語：商業空間中的「新鐵律」 – 幣圈生成誌 said,
June 1, 2025 @ 11:49 am
[…] 原始新聞連結 […]
Duncan said,
June 2, 2025 @ 12:58 am
I had only recently noticed someone using "Welcome In" before that first article (which I thought I had commented on but I don't see it now…), which was last September, just as the summer furnace is cooling off a bit here in Phoenix. My take on hearing it was thus that it was a shortened form of…
"Welcome in [from the heat]!"
Which with further expansion becomes:
"Thanks for braving that heat to visit today. Feel free to stay a bit and absorb some coolness before you go out into that furnace once again!"
(Obviously in many places the critical factor would of course be the cold of winter not the heat of summer…)
I know I've personally tried to express those sentiments before, with various degrees of compactness and satisfaction at my success in doing so, tho never coming up with the perhaps /too/ efficiently compacted "welcome in!" But that's what I read into it because that's what I've often tried to say myself!
JPL said,
June 2, 2025 @ 2:04 am
As for origins, why couldn't it simply be an internal (to English) development? Maybe managers started saying to clerks, "When you see someone come into the store, welcome them in!" And then the employee, instead of greeting with the perfectly acceptable "Welcome!", now thinks that's insufficient, and says, "Welcome in!". "in" is OK when welcome is functioning as a verb, but when it's simply functioning as a greeting and not as a verbal, the "in" sounds funny, because there's no apparent need for the explicit directionality. "Welcome back", is sensible, as is "welcome abord"; but what is "in" doing there? So, not ungrammatical, just an innovation.
Jonathan Smith said,
June 2, 2025 @ 10:36 am
IDK if southern specifically, but (again) this sounds perfectly ordinary to many including me. And no one would call a radio show about a perfectly ordinary expression. For older examples, found mostly by searching "welcome in, welcome" and stuff to try to isolate the greeting, you get e.g. —
“Welcome! christians welcome in, Welcome! To the Saviour’s home” — Hymns on the Principal Subjects of Evangelical Truth (1842)
“I passed by the crowded gate, and though the keeper was preventing the entrance of the crowd, finding that I was an American stranger, the porter said, ‘Welcome, welcome in,’ and opened the gate.” — Ireland’s Welcome to the Stranger… (1847)
“Are we sir, to open wide the door and send out our messengers to bid them welcome in?” — Report of the Debates and Proceedings of the Convention for the Revision of the Constitution of the State of Kentucky (1849)
“every bell in the city will ring welcome in, welcome in” — The Rise and Progress of The Kingdoms of Light & Darkness (1867)
“going hastily to the door, he went out with a smile of pleasure. ‘Let me loose the wicket—welcome in, welcome in!’” — My Cousin Maurice, A Novel (1872)
“[…] when the bell of Chaptico Church rang it said, ‘welcome in, welcome in.’” — A Genealogy of the Glassell Family of Scotland and Virginia (1891)
“Welcome in, sir, and drink a glass of something.” — Twisted Eglantine (1905)
Etc., etc., regionally UK and US “mid-Atlantic” and southern among others. And from every year from then through more recently as one wishes…
“Welcome in! Welcome to the NetWare 5 Garden” Novell's CNA Study Guide for NetWare 5.1 (1999) …
“Welcome in, welcome in. I hope the traffic was not too bad.” (translation of an example)
Discourse Phenomena in Typological Perspective (2006) …
“[…] the kind of hug that says welcome. Welcome in, welcome home, you are always welcome […]” Nothing But the Truth (2012) …
“Welcome in, welcome in, Mister Helge. My name is Chase" Section Seven (2023) …
So the issue is not "welcome in" but some kind of recency-collective-psychosis perpetuated by e.g. reddit.
Also good are welcome home, welcome back, welcome over, welcome up, welcome down. etc., etc., of course. For some meta: “Virginia’s long arms were wrapped around Emily, pumping in an out as she exclaimed, ‘Welcome up!’ Emily stepped back, winded and grinning, as ever slightly puzzled by the traditional greeting. Did the up refer to the hill country? […] Or did up mean north from the Bay Area […] shouldn’t Virginia say, ‘Welcome down’ […]?” — After Eden (2007)
Victor Mair said,
June 2, 2025 @ 12:12 pm
"some kind of recency-collective-psychosis" induced by….
Jacob Stewart said,
June 3, 2025 @ 8:33 am
>The better one will win, and that is as it's been throughout human history.
How do you know?
Maybe you just think that because you were born/grew up after it happened, or you just have a whig history or kraterocratic mindset (whether subtle or gross).
Grant Barrett said,
June 3, 2025 @ 1:46 pm
John, all those citations are marvelous and it's not the first time they've been seen. But mostly irrelevant. Because the issue is, why does it seem "welcome in" has had a surge *in commercial/retail dialog*? In that particular quasi-formal modern encounter?
JPL said,
June 3, 2025 @ 4:04 pm
@Grant Barrett:
Thanks for clarifying what is at issue in this post, as opposed to the previous one, which was focused (I thought, I may have been mistaken) on the grammatical role and status of the "in" in the greeting "welcome in!", as related to its uses in a post-verbal context. I just wanted to suggest a slight adjustment or addition in the conclusion, that the expression's apparent increase in usage is due to its fitting the "formality requirements of a very odd commercial interaction" more suitably than the bare "welcome!". I agree that "welcome in!" indicates a more formal register, but what interested me about it is that "welcome in", along with the other similar examples ("welcome home", "welcome back", "welcome aboard", etc.), indicates an encouraging response to the movement of the addressee toward the speaker and their surroundings (coming in to the shop) which a bare "welcome!" does not explicitly include. "In" does this by indicating the end-point of the movement. ("Welcome!" seems to be made for the case where the speaker is shaking the addressee's hand and saying "how do you do?".) And this "movement toward the speaker's place" element is also the element that is (apparently) explicitly included by "irasshaimase!" in the Japanese context. An expression like "come on in!" called out in an enthusiastic tone would have a similar effect, but would be a more "down home", less formal greeting, like to someone peeking around the slightly opened door of your house or office. ("On" is doing the extra work of encouragement here.) So I could see a Japanese speaker saying, "Just "welcome" is not enough. I want it to be like when I say "irasshaimase!".
Jonathan Smith said,
June 3, 2025 @ 8:04 pm
@Grant Barrett
that is a recast at least wrt the cited article and both this and the previous LL post, which suggest again and again that people (?) find "welcome in" syntactically ill-formed in some way: e.g., above. it should be "finish[ed] with something else"; user was "probably confused", etc.
a much better argument re: at least the earlier citations above would relate to JPL's thoughts: you could claim the expression there means "come on in"… which is of course different from "welcome in" when you're already "in."
Chas Belov said,
June 6, 2025 @ 1:32 am
I haven't heard "Welcome in" yet but it probably wouldn't bother me if I encountered it.
The one I'm bothered by is waiters who respond to your order with "Excellent choice!" as if you picked the wrong thing they would say "Dreadful choice!" Fortunately, that one seems to have gone by the wayside.