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Article published In:
Sex, Death & Politics: Taboos in Language
Edited by Melanie Keller, Philipp Striedl, Daniel Biro, Johanna Holzer and Benjamin Weber
[Pragmatics & Cognition 28:1] 2021
► pp. 167–192

Borrowing and the historical LGBTQ lexicon

Profile of a pragmatically marked field

Unlike most areas involving taboo, where language-internal innovations tend to dominate, homosexuality is characterized by a basic international vocabulary shared across multiple languages, notably English, French, Italian, Spanish and German. Historically, the lexis of nonnormative gender identity has shared space with that of sexual orientation. This lexicon includes (inexhaustively) the following series of internationalisms: sodomite, bugger, bardash, berdache, tribade, pederast, sapphist, lesbian, uranist, invert, homosexual, bisexual, trans, gay, queer. This common terminology has resulted from language contact in a broad sense, and more specifically from lexical borrowing (loanwords). Several framing devices are expressed through the lexicon: religious censure, distancing in time and space, othering, medicalization or pathologizing, but also in recent decades LGBTQ self-assertion and demands for equality. Rather than necessarily being subject to taboo, then, queerness represents a pragmatically marked semantic field in which the lexicon is highly dependent upon social factors and the communicative context.

Keywords: lexicology, borrowing, loanwords, LGBTQ, gender, homosexuality, pragmatics, taboo
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Lexical analysis
    • 2.1Religious censure
    • 2.2Distancing in time and space
      • 2.2.1Medieval innovations in Romance languages
      • 2.2.2Hellenisms from the early modern period onwards
    • 2.3Nineteenth-century Germanisms and the allure of scientism
    • 2.4Twentieth-century Anglicisms in the fight for self-determination
  • 3.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 March 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.00022.vec
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