Not just songs. F***ing english "sprinkles" are everywhere and it's annoying beyond words. "Myllärin by Helsingin mylly". 11 cases out of 10 it sounds imbecile, not cool.
this post was submitted on 08 May 2026
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Maybe English speaking people with tattoos of Chinese letters is the equivalent?
Because of the US and british empires, english functions as a prestige language, the language of international trade and english language media is widespread. Many people know at least a little english, and most languages have english loan words.
Plenty of US english songs have the odd spanish word. Doesn't 小蘋果 have a korean bit? Even hebrew prayers break into aramaic every now and again.
We live in a multi-lingual world and our songs reflect that.
Languages do borrow words from other languages, but this is not the phenomenon we see that OP is referencing. They are not talking about Japanese words borrowed from English. They mean entire choruses or strings of lyrics which are just put forth rendered in English (think "Let's Fighting Love." etc. Myriad examples of JPOP in particular doing this can be found in seconds.) Yes, I know you can point out a number of American songs which do this. You're very smart, but if you actually look at the numbers, non-anglosphere artists do this much more with English than the other way round.
In addition, the borrowing of words or the use of phrases from other languages by speakers of said languages does not change the place of a language in the family tree of languages. Japanese is not related to Chinese, despite more than 40% of its vocabulary being borrowed from Chinese.
English is firmly a Germanic language when examined from any real linguistic standpoint and not just what some idiot said on Tumblr 15 years ago when they realized English has some borrowed French vocabulary (which... spoiler alert: so do all of the other Germanic languages). I also find it interesting that the same pseudo-intellectuals who insist this would never insist that French, Italian or Spanish were not truly Romance languages, despite the massive borrowings into these languages of Germanic vocabulary through Gothic and Frankish which occurred in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
Look at the most basic and familiar registers of a language as far as vocabulary goes, look at grammar and syntax, phonology, etc. when classifying a language. The existence of borrowed vocbulary doesn't change this any more than wearing a kimono or drinking green tea would make me "part Japanese."
To answer the question: it is used as a virtue signal because English is the prestige languge of global capitalism right now. This is the same reason why self-hating anglophones think of it what they do: global capitalism treats it as a default setting (at least the most sterile, corporate-approved registers of the language, anyway.) Instead of a rich linguistic heritage, they see it the same way a fish sees water or we see the air.
Styx would like a word.
That feeling when you go to block someone, and you realize they're an alt of someone you already blocked....
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It's not Chinese but caliope mori does this alot with Japanese. A lot of it is pop rap and she is a ytuber so it may not be your style. She's incredibly talented though, she can do multiple simultaneous rhyme schemes while jumping between the two languages.
That strongly depends on culture. In poland this doesn't happen at all. On the other side, in Japanese works I've seen not only English words included, but completely fake languages (Nier Automata Ost) or pseudo languages faking Latin or English (Madoka Ost, Hellsing TV intro)
Why does songs from non-English countries have random English words?
Because most of the audience for non-English songs, particularly younger audiences, are bilingual (or multilingual) and likely speaks English better than you do.
Can you imagine if English songs randomly have Chinese words?
Yeah, that would be unusual, English speaking audiences generally don't speak Chinese.
More people speak English than any other language
There is no pure languages anymore. All languages borrow from each other. The tunisian dialect is full of french words