「見れる」は日本語の乱れ？ 最新調査で「見れた」53.8%、ら抜きは尾張で200年前から

Japanese has two ways to say "I could see it." The older form is "mirareta," and the newer one is "mireta." In a survey from 2026, 53.8 percent of people chose "mireta." Young people use it the most. Some people say the new form is bad Japanese.

But it is not really new. People in Owari, now part of Aichi, used this kind of form in the early 1800s.

In Japanese, "mirareru" can mean "can see" or "be seen," and it can also show respect, so listeners sometimes have to guess. The shorter form "mireru" only means "can see." This so-called "ra-less" form has often been called sloppy, but a government survey shows that more than half of people now use it with some verbs.

In the latest results, published in October 2026, 53.8 percent chose "mireta" over "mirareta." Only 6.2 percent chose "kangaerenai," the ra-less form of a longer verb. A 2019 study found that the form was used in the Owari dialect in the early 1800s, about a hundred years earlier than in the central dialects of Kyoto, Osaka and Edo. At first it appeared only with the shortest verbs.

For decades, forms like "mireru" and "koreru" have been treated as proof that young people are wrecking Japanese. In the Agency for Cultural Affairs' 2015 survey, "mireta" overtook the traditional "mirareta" for the first time, by 48.4 to 44.6 percent. In the round released in October 2026, 53.8 percent picked "mireta," and among respondents aged 16 to 19 the figure reached 81.3 percent.

The survey moved from interviews to mail in 2020 and dropped the "use both" option, so the two years are not a perfect match, but the age gap is hard to miss. The change is also uneven. Short verbs such as "miru," "kuru" and "deru" lose their "ra" far more often than "kangaeru," whose ra-less form only 6.2 percent chose. History fits this pattern.

The linguist Toshihiro Miyake found that the Owari dialect had the form by the early 1800s, about a century ahead of the central dialects, and at first only in two-mora verbs. Whether all this counts as progress or decay is a matter of values. Either way, the new form keeps "can see" apart from "be seen," much as English does with "could see" and "was seen."