International Journal of Language & Linguistics

The Japanese Suffix -Ppoi as a Modal
Fukumi Higashihira

Abstract
The Japanese suffix –ppoi makes an adjective and adds the meaning of „seems like…‟ or „has the appearance of…‟ to the original sentence, similar to the English -ish.-Ppoi follows nouns, verb stems and adjective stems. Recently, many people have started using –ppoi in their colloquial language, indicating speaker‟s degree of certainty and not merely just to indicate uncertainty as we have seen over the past. Traditionally, -ppoi, as in X-ppoi, functions only as a derivational suffix altering the meaning of the preceding word X. For newer usage of -ppoi, it is attached to the end of the sentence expressing speaker‟s attitude, uncertainty, etc., much like the other modals, sentence-final-soo „I hear,‟ yoo, rashii, mitai „seem‟, etc. This describes the expanded uses of -ppoi in current Japanese with the Google search for its ability to search for the current speech patterns of Japanese.

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