For real soccer fans, the upcoming World Cup in Brazil will be the highlight of the past four years. On top of that, many lukewarm supporters will surely soon discover that they are, in fact, true sports fans. But even those who consider it entirely pointless to watch 22 people running after a ball for how-long-was-it-again will find it difficult to entirely escape the frenzy that is sure to come after the kickoff of the opening match, between Brazil and Croatia, on June 13, 5 a.m. Japanese time. So let's make the best of it and have a look at the Japanese language of soccer.

The first thing to note is that the world of soccer is a world of English loanwords. Best example: the term sakkā (サッカー, soccer) itself. Though there is also shūkyū (蹴球), a combination of the two characters "kick" and "ball," this one is far less common and, unlike its lexical kin yakyū (野球, baseball), never really took root. The upcoming grand event is called sakkā wārudo kappu, same as the English Soccer World Cup but with Japanese pronunciation rules in effect. Incidentally, there are various ways of writing this term, including the katakana string ワールドカップ and the katakana-kanji compound ワールド杯. As "World" may also be acronymed into "W", this gives us two additional spellings, Ｗカップ and Ｗ杯. All four versions can be — and frequently are — pronounced sakkā wārudo kappu, so be sure not to talk about the daburyū kappu or something.

A study published a few years ago analyzed the number and frequency of loan words during NHK's live commentaries of the 2006 Soccer World Cup in Germany. The commentaries of five matches were examined, and found to contain no less than 477 different loanwords, mentioned a total of 3,918 times in the speech of the commentators. The No. 1 item, perhaps not entirely surprisingly, was bōru (ボール, ball). It occurred as an independent word 233 times during the five matches, plus another 77 times in combination with a country name, for example, Aruzenchin bōru (アルゼンチンボール, ball for Argentina).