Social acceptability of COVID-19 infection-related terms

Abstract

A statistical analysis of the social acceptability of COVID-19 infection-related terms was conducted. The data were collected by the Agency for Cultural Affairs in 2021 as part of the “Opinion Survey on the Japanese Language”. The method of analysis was logistic regression analysis, with the explanatory variables being year of birth (or age) and gender, and the objective variable being social acceptability. The results of the analysis showed that the effects of year of birth (or age) and gender were significant for katakana words, and only the effect of gender was significant for abbreviated words. On the other hand, neither the effects of year of birth (or age) nor gender were significant for the four-character kanji phrases. Some discussion of the results was attempted from the perspective of word types and coined words, and future issues were also touched upon. Finally, we argue for the active use of high-quality open data.