Publications
Publication details [#54244]
Bezooijen, Renée Van, Charlotte Gooskens and Sebastian Kürschner. 2010. The reflection of historical language contact in present-day Dutch and Swedish. In Jonge, Bob de, Muriel Norde and Cornelius Hasselblatt, eds. Language Contact. New perspectives. (IMPACT: Studies in Language and Society 28). John Benjamins. pp. 103–118.
Publication type
Article in book
Publication language
English
Keywords
Place, Publisher
John Benjamins
Annotation
The present study quantitatively examines similarly constructed samples of formal spoken Swedish and Dutch in order to compare the composition of the lexicons. Results showed that Swedish has many more loans than Dutch, namely 44.4% against 27.9%. Within the Swedish loans there is a large compartment of Low German (38.7%), whereas most loans in Dutch have a French origin (63.8%). The differences in terms of the number and distribution of loanwords between the lexical profiles of Swedish and Dutch appear to be stable, as they were attested both in the present study and in previous studies. They can be attributed to differences in the linguistic distances between source and borrowing languages and to differences in the intensity of the contacts.