Impactful beauty or serious disgust

Sammanfattning: The Japanese language utilizes primarily three writing systems; Kanji, hiragana and katakana. The latter two are known as kana. All three writing systems have their own unique role when writing in Japanese. Corresponding to their primary roles, there are various ‘sub roles’ as well. This paper will mainly be focusing on the katakana writing system’s lesser known role, emphasizing. Seven interviews have been conducted in order to find answers on this phenomenon. The purpose of this paper is to find out how emphasizing with katakana is utilized, when it is used and by whom it is used. These questions are answered by four Japanese native speakers around the ages 20-21 and three Japanese native speakers that are around the age of 40.