Proficiency in English is increasing across Europe. Because bilingual speech often contains ephemeral, speaker-specific nonce borrowings, code-switches, and all the other manifestations of crosslinguistic interaction, this will to a minor extent Anglicize much everyday language use. But increasing bilingualism is also likely to change patterns of borrowing. This article predicts that, while cultural and prestige borrowings from English will continue, increased proficiency in English will result in fewer false Anglicisms being created and more complex and abstract words being borrowed, although these will often not retain their native English meanings.
While certain Anglicisms (e.g. Event and Kids in German) typically appear as marked lexical choices, such effects are absent in other Anglicisms (e.g. Film and PC in German). In order to investigate these different pragmatic interpretations, we consider the criterion of whether an Anglicism exists alongside a semantically-close equivalent in the recipient language or not. Based on this criterion, we introduce a distinction into two types of loans or, more generally, into two types of lexical innovation: catachrestic and non-catachrestic innovation. These are linked to two different types of implicatures as proposed in Levinson’s (2000) theory of presumptive meanings. The distinction between the two types of loans will be exemplified by data drawn from a corpus analysis of Anglicisms in German. The discussion will particularly focus on frequency effects and on the importance of specific discourse traditions, which both underline the dynamic pragmatic nature of Anglicisms.
This article examines variation in gender assignment to English loanwords – a phenomenon that has rarely been studied on a large empirical basis to date. We report on a multi-method study of gender assignment to Anglicisms as evidenced by large newspaper corpora and experimental data elicited from German native speakers, allowing empirically well-grounded insights into methodological and sociolinguistic factors that determine gender variation. In contrast to earlier studies which assume variation in gender assignment to be especially prevalent in the early stages of integration, thus claiming that there is comparatively little variation in general, our findings show a substantial amount of variation among the test items. In general, we find that variation is higher in the informant data when compared to the corpus data.
This article raises some methodological questions related to data collection in connection with Norwegian Anglicism studies. Specifically, it queries the extent to which results from methodologically divergent studies can be used for comparative purposes, such as estimating the rate of impact of English influence on the Norwegian vocabulary, something which represents an important foundation for present-day language policy. Questions that are raised and discussed concern the unit of investigation itself and types of criteria used to identify Anglicisms: the factors of age and degree of establishment, the type and size of the source material, and the treatment and presentation of data. The article concludes that some methodological problems may be alleviated in the future by using computerized research corpora.
This article describes corpus-based research methods and language processing tools that are used for the systematic study of the influence of English on Norwegian lexis. The tools are developed in connection with the Norwegian Newspaper Corpus (NNC) project. The study presents a survey of the types of phenomena that an Anglicism detection tool should aim at identifying and the problems associated with the orthographic and morphological variability of Anglicisms. It also describes the development of an Anglicism detection tool and accounts for a set of experiments using lexicon-based, n-gram-based and combinatory methods. Finally it describes recently developed machine learning techniques that have been developed by the NNC team, arguing that the computational approach to Anglicism identification is a fruitful one.
This article offers an account of a pioneering project in the lexicographic description of recent Anglicisms in Serbian, the main result of which was the publication of a dictionary, entitled Du yu speak anglosrpski? Rečnik novijih anglicizama (Vasić et al. 2001). The discussion includes the following topics: (a) a typological identification of this dictionary, (b) a detailed presentation of a checklist of twenty-five problems which the authors had to address and the solutions which they implemented, regarding strategic decisions about the dictionary and aspects of its macrostructure, microstructure and graphic design, (c) a critical appraisal of the merits, demerits and implications of this dictionary and the entire project, and (d) an assessment of the future prospects of the dictionary.
The influence of English on Armenian is limited to borrowings at the lexical level. This brief survey examines the problem of the domestication of English words in Eastern Armenian. It is essential that our focus be on contrastive and typological studies of the two languages, as English and Eastern Armenian differ in their phonetic systems, systems of grammatical categories, and semantics. We analyze the phonetic and graphemic integration of Anglicisms in Eastern Armenian. We also elucidate the peculiarities of the grammatical integration of Anglicisms belonging to different parts of speech: nouns, adjectives, and verbs. The last part of the article is devoted to the problem of semantic integration of loanwords in the receptor language.
Today, single-word lexical borrowings are merely the tip of the iceberg of English impact. Thus, the notion of Anglicism should encompass all language features either adopted from English, adapted from English, or inspired by English, used in intralingual communication in another language. This article focuses on the subterranean impact of English as expressed through the morphosyntactic calques found in contemporary Danish, a language influenced until the 20th century mainly by German lexis and phraseology. The linguistic market shares of near-synonymous expressions were measured in Danish text corpora at 5-year intervals between 1990 and 2010. It was found that established Danish expressions tend to lose ground, while expressions based on English models typically gain popularity – a development hitherto lacking empirical documentation.
The French written press abounds with multi-word loan translations from English, such as en terme(s) de or adopter un profil bas. The results provided in this study correspond to the presence of this type of phrases in the French weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur in the first decade of the 21st century. Although some have been in use for several decades, they clearly show a steady and unbroken evolution in the last few years. Multi-word semantic borrowings, as is the case with tour noir, are less pervasive and tend to go unnoticed to the general reader. There are, however, two different stages of integration corresponding to higher or lower frequency rates, typographical markers and lexicographical treatment.
The creation of new digitized corpora of Spanish such as CORDE and CREA in the late years of the 20th century came to facilitate enormously the job of lexicographers and linguists interested in studying the influence of English on Spanish. Indeed, these electronic resources offer sounder and more reliable ways of exploring and characterizing Anglicisms in Spanish. The present article situates itself in this corpus-based approach and shows how the aforementioned electronic resources can help us track down the occurrence of foreign usages more systematically and assess the extent of their presence in Spanish more accurately.
English has become the lingua franca of the modern world. The high degree of exposure to English in popular culture and the media speeds up the pace of lexical borrowing. This article deals with the influence of English on German phraseology. It is based on the corpus of the Institut für deutsche Sprache (COSMAS II) and a corpus of German newspaper articles, which allows comparative investigations over a period of ten years. The study reveals that English is now making an important contribution in disseminating phraseological units (used in their original form in English and as loan translations). Three criteria have been found relevant to prove their Anglo-American origin: (1) use in an English-speaking context (including translations), (2) explicit metacommunicative signalling of the origin and (3) variability of form.
The aim of this article is to discuss recent borrowings of English proverbs into Polish. Foreign proverbs are often cited when members of a linguistic community wish to signal their identification with another community, which is why changes in proverbial language may be indicative of the adoption of new cultural patterns by a society. It seems that a few English proverbs have begun to replace outdated Polish sayings, while some others, such as those reflecting patterns of Anglo-American culture, are being added to the stock of traditional Polish proverbs. The present study is corpus based. It discusses the contexts in which the proverbs appear in Polish, the metalinguistic tags used to introduce them, and the cultural significance of these borrowings.
Football language is arguably the world’s most widespread special language, where English has played – and still plays – a dominant role. The present study reports on the influence of English in terms of direct loans in this field, as manifested in 16 European languages. Based on a set of 25 English football words – dribble, goal, offside, hooligan, etc. – the investigation shows that while direct borrowing is common, there is a great deal of variation between the languages studied, Norwegian exhibiting the highest number of foreign loans and Finnish the lowest. The significance of the resulting patterns is discussed, providing some tentative explanations of the phenomena noted, where linguistic, sociolinguistic and cultural factors are taken into account.
In spite of the universally acknowledged worldwide influence of English on our native languages, once an English word crosses the borders to become an Anglicism, it undergoes a process of incorporation into the receiving language. This paper concerns the economics-related Anglicisms used in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) and suggests that it is possible to identify four different patterns: drawn from a pool of more than ten million tokens, the eighty words selected exemplify three stages of foreign-word incorporation, from hapax legomena to fully incorporated and commonly recognized Anglicisms of specialized discourse.
We describe a corpus study of the Anglicisms and false Anglicisms used by two major Italian newspapers (La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera) in their representation of the bailout and privatization of the Italian airline Alitalia. Our aim is to establish if and to what extent the use of new non-adapted Anglicisms in news reports of Alitalia’s crisis and privatization, especially in the domains of economics and aviation, had an impact on the transparency of the information provided. The results show that, in the coverage of this news story, new Anglicisms are often left undefined, or provided with an inappropriate Italian equivalent. This may have made it more difficult for readers to develop a thorough understanding of Alitalia’s crisis and privatization.
Proficiency in English is increasing across Europe. Because bilingual speech often contains ephemeral, speaker-specific nonce borrowings, code-switches, and all the other manifestations of crosslinguistic interaction, this will to a minor extent Anglicize much everyday language use. But increasing bilingualism is also likely to change patterns of borrowing. This article predicts that, while cultural and prestige borrowings from English will continue, increased proficiency in English will result in fewer false Anglicisms being created and more complex and abstract words being borrowed, although these will often not retain their native English meanings.
While certain Anglicisms (e.g. Event and Kids in German) typically appear as marked lexical choices, such effects are absent in other Anglicisms (e.g. Film and PC in German). In order to investigate these different pragmatic interpretations, we consider the criterion of whether an Anglicism exists alongside a semantically-close equivalent in the recipient language or not. Based on this criterion, we introduce a distinction into two types of loans or, more generally, into two types of lexical innovation: catachrestic and non-catachrestic innovation. These are linked to two different types of implicatures as proposed in Levinson’s (2000) theory of presumptive meanings. The distinction between the two types of loans will be exemplified by data drawn from a corpus analysis of Anglicisms in German. The discussion will particularly focus on frequency effects and on the importance of specific discourse traditions, which both underline the dynamic pragmatic nature of Anglicisms.
This article examines variation in gender assignment to English loanwords – a phenomenon that has rarely been studied on a large empirical basis to date. We report on a multi-method study of gender assignment to Anglicisms as evidenced by large newspaper corpora and experimental data elicited from German native speakers, allowing empirically well-grounded insights into methodological and sociolinguistic factors that determine gender variation. In contrast to earlier studies which assume variation in gender assignment to be especially prevalent in the early stages of integration, thus claiming that there is comparatively little variation in general, our findings show a substantial amount of variation among the test items. In general, we find that variation is higher in the informant data when compared to the corpus data.
This article raises some methodological questions related to data collection in connection with Norwegian Anglicism studies. Specifically, it queries the extent to which results from methodologically divergent studies can be used for comparative purposes, such as estimating the rate of impact of English influence on the Norwegian vocabulary, something which represents an important foundation for present-day language policy. Questions that are raised and discussed concern the unit of investigation itself and types of criteria used to identify Anglicisms: the factors of age and degree of establishment, the type and size of the source material, and the treatment and presentation of data. The article concludes that some methodological problems may be alleviated in the future by using computerized research corpora.
This article describes corpus-based research methods and language processing tools that are used for the systematic study of the influence of English on Norwegian lexis. The tools are developed in connection with the Norwegian Newspaper Corpus (NNC) project. The study presents a survey of the types of phenomena that an Anglicism detection tool should aim at identifying and the problems associated with the orthographic and morphological variability of Anglicisms. It also describes the development of an Anglicism detection tool and accounts for a set of experiments using lexicon-based, n-gram-based and combinatory methods. Finally it describes recently developed machine learning techniques that have been developed by the NNC team, arguing that the computational approach to Anglicism identification is a fruitful one.
This article offers an account of a pioneering project in the lexicographic description of recent Anglicisms in Serbian, the main result of which was the publication of a dictionary, entitled Du yu speak anglosrpski? Rečnik novijih anglicizama (Vasić et al. 2001). The discussion includes the following topics: (a) a typological identification of this dictionary, (b) a detailed presentation of a checklist of twenty-five problems which the authors had to address and the solutions which they implemented, regarding strategic decisions about the dictionary and aspects of its macrostructure, microstructure and graphic design, (c) a critical appraisal of the merits, demerits and implications of this dictionary and the entire project, and (d) an assessment of the future prospects of the dictionary.
The influence of English on Armenian is limited to borrowings at the lexical level. This brief survey examines the problem of the domestication of English words in Eastern Armenian. It is essential that our focus be on contrastive and typological studies of the two languages, as English and Eastern Armenian differ in their phonetic systems, systems of grammatical categories, and semantics. We analyze the phonetic and graphemic integration of Anglicisms in Eastern Armenian. We also elucidate the peculiarities of the grammatical integration of Anglicisms belonging to different parts of speech: nouns, adjectives, and verbs. The last part of the article is devoted to the problem of semantic integration of loanwords in the receptor language.
Today, single-word lexical borrowings are merely the tip of the iceberg of English impact. Thus, the notion of Anglicism should encompass all language features either adopted from English, adapted from English, or inspired by English, used in intralingual communication in another language. This article focuses on the subterranean impact of English as expressed through the morphosyntactic calques found in contemporary Danish, a language influenced until the 20th century mainly by German lexis and phraseology. The linguistic market shares of near-synonymous expressions were measured in Danish text corpora at 5-year intervals between 1990 and 2010. It was found that established Danish expressions tend to lose ground, while expressions based on English models typically gain popularity – a development hitherto lacking empirical documentation.
The French written press abounds with multi-word loan translations from English, such as en terme(s) de or adopter un profil bas. The results provided in this study correspond to the presence of this type of phrases in the French weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur in the first decade of the 21st century. Although some have been in use for several decades, they clearly show a steady and unbroken evolution in the last few years. Multi-word semantic borrowings, as is the case with tour noir, are less pervasive and tend to go unnoticed to the general reader. There are, however, two different stages of integration corresponding to higher or lower frequency rates, typographical markers and lexicographical treatment.
The creation of new digitized corpora of Spanish such as CORDE and CREA in the late years of the 20th century came to facilitate enormously the job of lexicographers and linguists interested in studying the influence of English on Spanish. Indeed, these electronic resources offer sounder and more reliable ways of exploring and characterizing Anglicisms in Spanish. The present article situates itself in this corpus-based approach and shows how the aforementioned electronic resources can help us track down the occurrence of foreign usages more systematically and assess the extent of their presence in Spanish more accurately.
English has become the lingua franca of the modern world. The high degree of exposure to English in popular culture and the media speeds up the pace of lexical borrowing. This article deals with the influence of English on German phraseology. It is based on the corpus of the Institut für deutsche Sprache (COSMAS II) and a corpus of German newspaper articles, which allows comparative investigations over a period of ten years. The study reveals that English is now making an important contribution in disseminating phraseological units (used in their original form in English and as loan translations). Three criteria have been found relevant to prove their Anglo-American origin: (1) use in an English-speaking context (including translations), (2) explicit metacommunicative signalling of the origin and (3) variability of form.
The aim of this article is to discuss recent borrowings of English proverbs into Polish. Foreign proverbs are often cited when members of a linguistic community wish to signal their identification with another community, which is why changes in proverbial language may be indicative of the adoption of new cultural patterns by a society. It seems that a few English proverbs have begun to replace outdated Polish sayings, while some others, such as those reflecting patterns of Anglo-American culture, are being added to the stock of traditional Polish proverbs. The present study is corpus based. It discusses the contexts in which the proverbs appear in Polish, the metalinguistic tags used to introduce them, and the cultural significance of these borrowings.
Football language is arguably the world’s most widespread special language, where English has played – and still plays – a dominant role. The present study reports on the influence of English in terms of direct loans in this field, as manifested in 16 European languages. Based on a set of 25 English football words – dribble, goal, offside, hooligan, etc. – the investigation shows that while direct borrowing is common, there is a great deal of variation between the languages studied, Norwegian exhibiting the highest number of foreign loans and Finnish the lowest. The significance of the resulting patterns is discussed, providing some tentative explanations of the phenomena noted, where linguistic, sociolinguistic and cultural factors are taken into account.
In spite of the universally acknowledged worldwide influence of English on our native languages, once an English word crosses the borders to become an Anglicism, it undergoes a process of incorporation into the receiving language. This paper concerns the economics-related Anglicisms used in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) and suggests that it is possible to identify four different patterns: drawn from a pool of more than ten million tokens, the eighty words selected exemplify three stages of foreign-word incorporation, from hapax legomena to fully incorporated and commonly recognized Anglicisms of specialized discourse.
We describe a corpus study of the Anglicisms and false Anglicisms used by two major Italian newspapers (La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera) in their representation of the bailout and privatization of the Italian airline Alitalia. Our aim is to establish if and to what extent the use of new non-adapted Anglicisms in news reports of Alitalia’s crisis and privatization, especially in the domains of economics and aviation, had an impact on the transparency of the information provided. The results show that, in the coverage of this news story, new Anglicisms are often left undefined, or provided with an inappropriate Italian equivalent. This may have made it more difficult for readers to develop a thorough understanding of Alitalia’s crisis and privatization.