Globally Speaking: Motives for Adopting English Vocabulary in Other Languages 9781847690524

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Figures
Contributors
Introduction
1. The Hegemony of English and Determinants of Borrowing from Its Vocabulary
2. Icelandic: Phonosemantic Matching
3. French: Tradition versus Innovation as Reflected in English Borrowings
4. Dutch: Is It Threatened by English?
5. Hungarian: Trends and Determinants of English Borrowing in a Market Economy Newcomer
6. Russian: From Socialist Realism to Reality Show
7. Hebrew: Borrowing Ideology and Pragmatic Aspects in a Modern(ised) Language
8. Colloquial Arabic (in Israel): The Case of English Loan Words in a Minority Language with Diglossia
9. Amharic: Political and Social Effects on English Loan Words
10. Farsi: The Modernisation Process and the Advent of English
11. Indian Languages: Hidden English in Texts and Society
12. Chinese in Taiwan: Cooking a Linguistic Chop Suey and Embracing English
13. Japanese: The Dialectic Relationships Between ‘Westerness’ and ‘Japaneseness’ as Reflected in English Loan Words
14. Conclusion: Features of Borrowing from English in 12 Languages
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Globally Speaking

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS SERIES Series Editor: Professor John Edwards, St Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada Other Books in the Series Motivation in Language Planning and Language Policy Dennis Ager Multilingualism in Spain M. Teresa Turell (ed.) A Dynamic Model of Multilingualism Philip Herdina and Ulrike Jessner Beyond Boundaries: Language and Identity in Contemporary Europe Paul Gubbins and Mike Holt (eds) Bilingualism: Beyond Basic Principles Jean-Marc Dewaele, Alex Housen and Li Wei (eds) Ideology and Image: Britain and Language Dennis Ager Where East Looks West: Success in English in Goa and on the Konkan Coast Dennis Kurzon English in Africa: After the Cold War Alamin M. Mazrui Politeness in Europe Leo Hickey and Miranda Stewart (eds) Language in Jewish Society: Towards a New Understanding John Myhill Maintaining a Minority Language John Gibbons and Elizabeth Ramirez Urban Multilingualism in Europe Guus Extra and Kutlay Yagmur (eds) Cultural and Linguistic Policy Abroad: The Italian Experience Mariella Totaro-Genevois Language Decline and Death in Africa: Causes, Consequences and Challenges Herman M. Batibo Directions in Applied Linguistics Paul Bruthiaux, Dwight Atkinson, William G. Eggington, William Grabe and Vaidehi Ramanathan (eds) Language Diversity in the Pacific: Endangerment and Survival Denis Cunningham, D.E. Ingram and Kenneth Sumbuk (eds) Multilingualism in European Bilingual Contexts: Language Use and Attitudes David Lasagabaster and Ángel Huguet (eds) Linguistic Landscapes: A Comparative Study of Urban Multilingualism in Tokyo Peter Backhaus The Defence of French: A Language in Crisis? Robin Adamson Minority Language Media: Concepts, Critiques and Case Studies Mike Cormack and Niamh Hourigan The Sociolinguistics of Development in Africa Paulin G. Djité For more details of these or any other of our publications, please contact: Multilingual Matters, Frankfurt Lodge, Clevedon Hall, Victoria Road, Clevedon, BS21 7HH, England http://www.multilingual-matters.com

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS 140 Series Editor: John Edwards

Globally Speaking Motives for Adopting English Vocabulary in Other Languages Edited by

Judith Rosenhouse and Rotem Kowner

MULTILINGUAL MATTERS Clevedon • Buffalo • Toronto

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Globally Speaking: Motives for Adopting English Vocabulary in Other Languages Edited by Judith Rosenhouse and Rotem Kowner. Multilingual Matters: 140 Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. English language–Influence on foreign languages. 2. Language and languages–Foreign elements. 3. English language–Globalization. I. Rosenhouse, J. II. Kowner, Rotem. PE1073.G563 2008 420.9– dc22 2007040066 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN-13: 978-1-84769-051-7 (hbk) Multilingual Matters UK: Frankfurt Lodge, Clevedon Hall, Victoria Road, Clevedon BS21 7HH. USA: UTP, 2250 Military Road, Tonawanda, NY 14150, USA. Canada: UTP, 5201 Dufferin Street, North York, Ontario M3H 5T8, Canada. Copyright © 2008 Judith Rosenhouse, Rotem Kowner and the authors of individual chapters. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. The policy of Multilingual Matters/Channel View Publications is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products, made from wood grown in sustainable forests. In the manufacturing process of our books, and to further support our policy, preference is given to printers that have FSC and PEFC Chain of Custody certification. The FSC and/or PEFC logos will appear on those books where full certification has been granted to the printer concerned. Typeset by Datapage International Ltd. Printed and bound in Great Britain by the Cromwell Press Ltd.

Contents List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 The Hegemony of English and Determinants of Borrowing from Its Vocabulary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rotem Kowner and Judith Rosenhouse 2 Icelandic: Phonosemantic Matching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Yair Sapir and Ghil‘ad Zuckermann 3 French: Tradition versus Innovation as Reflected in English Borrowings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Miriam Ben-Rafael 4 Dutch: Is It Threatened by English?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Herman J. De Vries Jr. 5 Hungarian: Trends and Determinants of English Borrowing in a Market Economy Newcomer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Zsuzsanna Gombos-Sziklaine´ and Zolta´n Sturcz with Judith Rosenhouse and Rotem Kowner 6 Russian: From Socialist Realism to Reality Show . . . . . . . . . Maria Yelenevskaya 7 Hebrew: Borrowing Ideology and Pragmatic Aspects in a Modern(ised) Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Judith Rosenhouse and Haya Fisherman 8 Colloquial Arabic (in Israel): The Case of English Loan Words in a Minority Language with Diglossia. . . . . . . . . . . Judith Rosenhouse 9 Amharic: Political and Social Effects on English Loan Words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anbessa Teferra 10 Farsi: The Modernisation Process and the Advent of English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Soli Shahvar 11 Indian Languages: Hidden English in Texts and Society . . . Dennis Kurzon v

.... 1 ...

4

. . . 19

. . . 44 . . . 68

. . . 82

. . . 98

. . 121

. . . 145

. . . 164

. . . 187 . . . 208

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Chinese in Taiwan: Cooking a Linguistic Chop Suey and Embracing English . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227 Sufen Sophia Lai 13 Japanese: The Dialectic Relationships Between ‘Westerness’ and ‘Japaneseness’ as Reflected in English Loan Words. . . . . . . 250 Rotem Kowner and Michal Daliot-Bul 14 Conclusion: Features of Borrowing from English in 12 Languages. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276 Judith Rosenhouse and Rotem Kowner

12

Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296

List of Figures 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 3.1 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 8.1 8.2 14.1 14.2 14.3 14.4

Phonosemantic matching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Phonosemantic matching of AIDS in Icelandic . . . . . . . . . Artichoke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Phonosemantic matching of AIDS in Icelandic, Modern Standard Mandarin and Hebrew. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Phonosemantic matching of TECHNICAL in Icelandic, Arabic and Israeli . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Francophone borrowings
a sample out of 360 occurrences. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hebrew adjectives with various frequencies of occurrence (five times and higher) (back-translated into English) . . . . List of borrowings from the entertainment and communication domains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . List of borrowings from other high-frequency domains . . Summary of our sample with examples from English. . . . Total number of types of English loan words in Hebrew in the sample . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Classification of nouns, adjectives, verbs and other word types borrowed from English in the sample . . . . . . Patterns of adjectives and their distribution in Study 1 . . . Classes of words borrowed from English into colloquial Arabic. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Examples of borrowed words from English . . . . . . . . . . . The 12 case studies and their propensity for borrowing English vocabulary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Propensity for borrowing English vocabulary
ranking order . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Main factors for borrowing English vocabulary . . . . . . . . Motives, determinants and outcomes of English loan-word integration in borrowing languages . . . . . . . . .

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. . . . 28 . . . . 29 . . . . 35 . . . . 36 . . . . 38 . . . . 58 . . . 130 . . . 131 . . . 132 . . . 134 . . . 137 . . . 137 . . . 138 . . . 152 . . . 153 . . . 279 . . . 285 . . . 290 . . . 291

Contributors Miriam Ben-Rafael is an applied linguist and teacher of French as a foreign language. Her doctoral thesis focused on the language of Frenchspeaking immigrants in Israel in contact with Hebrew, and in a series of publications she has coined and publicised the term of ‘Franbreu’. In recent years, she has also turned to the investigation of the contemporary influence of English in French. She is now involved in a comprehensive study of the impact of globalisation on the language of French-speaking youth. Michal Daliot-Bul is a lecturer in Japanese studies at the University of Haifa, Israel and a translator. Her research interests include the deep cultural meanings and functions of play, urban culture, cross-cultural flows and the production of intra- and intercultural imaginaries. In addition to a number of published and forthcoming articles, she is currently revising for publication her doctoral thesis entitled ‘Licensed to Play
Play and Playfulness in the Japanese Culture’. Herman J. De Vries Jr. is Associate Professor of Germanic Languages at Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI, USA, where he teaches the Dutch and German languages and literature. Since 1999 he has held the college’s Queen Juliana Chair of the Language and Culture of the Netherlands. His current research examines the question of language within the discussion on national identity in the Netherlands. Haya Fisherman is a lecturer in Hebrew Language at the University of Haifa and the Gordon College of Education, Haifa, Israel, and specialises in the study of Contemporary Hebrew and sociolinguistics. She has studied the status of Hebrew in the Romanian Jewish community, official languages in Israel, language maintenance in Israel, attitudes to the use of foreign words in Hebrew, and Yiddish in Israel. She also contributes to Hebrew teaching methodology in high schools in various frameworks of the Ministry of Education. ix

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Zsuzsanna Gombos-Sziklaine´ is Associate Professor at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. She specialises in crosscultural communication and has been involved in the development of cultural studies programmes for international students. Her major fields of research and training are Language for Specific (Engineering and Business) Purposes, methodology of LSP training and fundamentals of LSP programmes for different target groups. Rotem Kowner is Professor of Japanese history and culture at the University of Haifa, Israel and specialising in Japan’s modernisation, attitudes to the Other, and Japanese language. His recent works include Historical Dictionary of the Russo-Japanese War, and the edited volume The Impact of the Russo-Japanese War. He is currently working on a book on the role of racial and bodily images in shaping Meiji Japan, and on a comprehensive method for teaching the Japanese writing system to foreigners. Dennis Kurzon is Professor of English linguistics at the University of Haifa, Israel, and specialises in pragmatics, legal language, adpositions and the sociology of language in India. His recent works include Where East Looks West: Success in English in Goa and on the Konkan Coast (2003), Discourse of Silence (1998) and the edited volume Prepositions in their Syntactic, Semantic and Pragmatic Context (2002). In the field of Indian linguistics, he is currently working on a book on writing systems and religion in Bengal. Sufen Sophia Lai is Associate Professor of English at Grand Valley State University, MI, USA, specialising in comparative literary studies. Her research areas include the history of the afterlife, gender discourse, woman warriors and cross-dressing themes in traditional China. Her recent works include a literary biography of Guo Pu (276
324) collected in Classical Chinese Writers: Pre-Tang Era. Currently she is working on a book on the historical realities and representations of the ‘Kingdoms of Women’ in China. Judith Rosenhouse, Professor of Arabic linguistics at the Department of Humanities and Arts, the Technion I.I.T, has since her retirement joined Swantech
Sound Waves Analysis and Technologies Ltd. She has published numerous books and papers in many areas of Arabic and Hebrew linguistics, phonetics, bilingualism and sociolinguistics, among them: The Bedouin Arabic Dialects (1984), Colloquial Arabic for Medical

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Personnel (1989), Trilingual Hebrew-Literary Arabic-Colloquial Arabic Dictionary (2001) and Trilingual Literary Arabic-Hebrew-Colloquial Arabic Dictionary (2004). Yair Sapir is affiliated with the Centre of Multiethnic Research at Uppsala University, Sweden. His doctoral thesis is on Modern Icelandic word formation and he has taught Grammar and Phonetics, Icelandic, Danish and Hebrew to beginners and intermediate students at Uppsala University. Currently he researches Elfdalian, a local minority language spoken in the north of the Dalarna region in Sweden. Soli Shahvar is lecturer of Iranian history and Director of the Ezri Center for Iran and Persian Gulf Studies at the University of Haifa, Israel. He is specializing in a number of fields related to the modern history of the Middle East, in general, and Iran, in particular, such as: the advent of modern technology into the Middle East; religious minorities in Iran; Iran-Ottoman and Iran-Israel relations; Iranian merchants of the later Qajar period; and the propaganda strategies and tactics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. He has recently completed writing a book on the Baha’i schools in Iran, titled ‘The Forgotten Schools’: The Baha’is and Modern Education in Iran, 1899
1934 (London & New York: I B Tauris, due June 2008). Zolta´n Sturcz is Associate Professor and Vice Dean at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. His major fields include Hungarian Linguistics, research and teaching Hungarian as a Foreign Language, Communication for Engineering and Business Purposes, needs analysis for communication, history of teaching foreign languages and the history of language training methodology. He has been the project leader and co-author of the course book Hungarian as a Foreign Language (Threshold Level), developed according to Common European Framework requirements. Anbessa Teferra is a Lecturer of Ethiopian languages viz. Amharic and Sidaama at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, Israel. He specialises in Amharic grammar and lexicography, Sidaama grammar, Hebrew
Amharic lexicography, etc. Among his publication is a Hebrew
Amharic Multimedia Dictionary of 17,000 words. He also jointly authored a forthcoming book entitled Essentials of Amharic and is currently working on a detailed grammar book of Sidaama.

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Maria Yelenevskaya is a Senior Teaching Fellow at the Department of Humanities and Arts of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. Most of her publications deal with problems of multilingualism, multiculturalism and media discourse. She also pursues research on immigrant communities and has published over 15 articles and a book The Russian Street in the Jewish State: Investigation into the Folklore of Immigrants of the 1990s to Israel (with L. Fialkova). Her current research involves issues in political and legal discourse. Ghil‘ad Zuckermann is Associate Professor and ARC Discovery Fellow at The University of Queensland, Australia. He has taught and held research posts in Israel, Singapore, Italy, Japan, the UK and the USA. His numerous publications include the books Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew and Hebrew as Myth. He is currently working on two further books: Language Genesis and Multiple Causation and Language Academies.

Introduction ROTEM KOWNER and JUDITH ROSENHOUSE

English is the lingua franca of the modern world, the ‘vehicular’ language used for science, international business and for communication at virtually any large international meeting. Speakers of English can be found in almost any corner of the globe, which is no wonder when you are the main or the official language in over 75 states and territories. Indeed, since WWII, English has occupied a new position never held by any other language before: it has become a global lingua franca. This is attested by the extent of its geographical spread, the number of its speakers and overall significance. Yet, English is not only spoken by an unprecedented number of people, both absolutely and relatively, but it also serves as a fertile field for lexical borrowing. That is, other languages are increasingly turning to English as a source for new vocabulary and incorporating English loan words in their lexicon. This volume explores the determinants of and motives for contemporary lexical borrowing from English, using a comparative approach and a broad cross-cultural perspective. By analysing 12 different languages, we isolated a number of factors that describe pattern of borrowing from English at present. From an analysis of the borrowing processes in these languages, all following similar lines, we are able to offer an account of historical trends in lexical borrowing, and to draw broader conclusions about the spread of English. The book opens with a historical review of the emergence of English as a global lingua franca and a presentation of our hypotheses regarding the motives for lexical borrowing from English in world languages. This introductory chapter is followed by 12 chapters; each serves as a case study of a different language. The contributors of these case studies, many of them renowned linguists in their respective domains, were approached to write not only because of their original contribution to the topic but also because of the special standing of their respective language within linguistic studies. Thus, two languages are described here for the 1

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first time in the context of English loan words and their effects on the receiving language: Teferra describes the state of affairs of the Amharic language in Ethiopia and Shahavar writes about the Persian language in contemporary Iran. These two countries have witnessed turbulent political and cultural changes and development in the 20th century which have left their marks on their official languages, as analysed in these chapters. Other chapters depict similarly intriguing historical background and diverse types of contacts with English as well as with British and Americans. These chapters include Ben-Rafael’s study on the French language in France; de Vries Jr.’s study on the Dutch language; Kowner and Daliot-Bul’s analysis of linguistic borrowing in Japan, a nation which underwent a period of American occupation in the 20th century after a major trauma during WWII; and Lai’s chapter on Taiwan
Chinese, whose recent history fluctuates between Chinese and English. Additional chapters examine the political circumstances which have affected the state of two languages representing East and Central Europe in our book: the Russian language brought forth by Yelenevskaya, and the Hungarian language, the latter reflecting a joint effort by Gombos and Sturcz with both editors of this volume. The case of Hebrew (by Rosenhouse and Fisherman) and Arabic (by Rosenhouse) in Israel presents the case of two official languages within a single State. Two chapters discuss specific details in the process of borrowing English loan words: Sapir and Zuckermann analyse relevant semantic processes in English loan-word borrowing in Icelandic, while Kurzon brings to light processes of ‘hidden English’ in various regions of India. This selection of languages also offers a picture of processes occurring in many language families: Latin, Germanic, Iranian and Slavic within the Indo-European language group; Northern, Central and South-Western languages within the Semitic (Afro-Asiatic) language group; a Finno-Ugric language (Hungarian), an Altaic language (Japanese) and a Sino-Tibetan language (Taiwan Chinese). All in all, not only the general framework of the book is novel, but several of the chapters in this volume deal with adoption processes in languages that have never been examined hitherto. Some of the chapters also put forth new or unheeded facts. Among these we find, e.g. the role of phonosemantic matching in lexical innovation and the intricate structures it involves, or the fact that political regimes (or their changes) or linguistic authorities (and purists) cannot change the course of lexical development. In fact, even political VIPs (e.g. in France, Japan, or the Netherlands) cannot help using English loan words.

Introduction

3

Critically, this book suggests that the English lexical ‘invasion’ depicted in each chapter is a natural and inevitable process, driven by psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic and sociohistorical factors. Moreover, it demonstrates that borrowed loan words constitute part of the normal way languages develop and survive. Although speakers’ attitudes concerning loan words (either pro or con such words) may be emotional, we conclude that when borrowed lexical items are used in communication, the main driving force behind them is apparently the need for efficient and expressive communication. This conclusion may be generalised beyond the English borrowings in the languages studied here to other languages, to other forms of linguistic communication, such as metaphors, and to universal linguistic structures such as the transfer of lexical items between dialects of a certain language or different language registers. This project began in early 1997 as a collaborative research of the two us, comparing the adoption and usages of English loan words in Japanese and Hebrew (Kowner & Rosenhouse, 1997, 2001). The issues raised during this limited undertaking prompted us to probe into the broader questions of the general pattern of and motives for adoption of English loan words throughout the globe. Throughout this decade, we have been fortunate to collaborate with many bright and enthusiastic scholars, who shared with us their thoughts and knowledge in many conference panels, workshops and informal meetings we organised on this topic. During those years we came to owe a debt of gratitude to many people. Foremost among them are the contributors to this book, who supported us patiently and enlightened us with their insights on their respective language and culture. Similarly, we are grateful to the Research Authority at the University of Haifa, for its generous financial support provided during 2002
03 for a ‘University interdisciplinary project’ on ‘Models of semantic patterns for adoption of loan words: A comparative interdisciplinary and cross-cultural research’. This grant has been very useful for conducting frequent workshops and for the completion of this book. We also extend our thanks to Swantech
Sound Waves Analysis and Technologies Ltd.
for kindly allowing us the time to complete this project. Finally, we are indebted to our spouses, Fabienne and Giora. As always, they endured our academic pursuit without complaint while providing a constant source of moral support.

Chapter 1

The Hegemony of English and Determinants of Borrowing from Its Vocabulary ROTEM KOWNER and JUDITH ROSENHOUSE

Since the second half of the 20th century English has become a global lingua franca. Whereas Mandarin remains the world’s most widely spoken first language, English has emerged as the world’s first choice as a second language; more importantly, it is by now the principal means for international communication. The effect of English does not end with its wide usage. With its rise, English has come to serve many languages as a source for intensive lexical borrowing, reflecting the importance and status it holds as a leading language. This ongoing process, however, has not been uniform. Certain societies have offered resistance to the spread of English and a reluctance to borrow its vocabulary. Others have embraced English, making English loan words an important part of their vocabulary, using it in codeswitching, and even adopting it as their main language. The Italian phrase lingua franca (literally Frankish language), which now denotes English as a leading language, referred originally to the hybrid language created and used in the Mediterranean area. From early times, seamen and merchants in certain Mediterranean ports used a mixture of languages, predominantly Italian, but with many lexical elements from Greek, Spanish, Arabic, Turkish and French, for communicating with each other (Cifoletti, 1989; Schuchardt, 1980). Although the term means literally ‘European language’, it arguably narrowed down to Romance-based pidgin (e.g. Minervini, 1996). Evidently, there was nothing distinctive about the Mediterranean lingua franca, and other hybrid languages, often linguistically defined as pidgins and creoles, emerged in many other places where people speaking different languages intermingled for a prolonged length of time (Gilbert, 2002; Jahr and Broch, 1996; Mu¨hlha¨usler, 1986; Sebba, 1997). 4

Determinants of Borrowing from English and its Hegemony

5

These forms of mixed and simplified language were not the only means of intergroup communication. In many places where speakers of different languages met they chose to speak one language. Usually it was the language of the majority, although in some cases numerical advantage did not play a crucial role, but the importance of the culture or nation to which the speakers belonged did. Over the years, the term lingua franca gained an additional meaning: now, it also denotes a leading language, not a hybrid but a proper language, which serves as a medium of communication between speakers of different languages in a given region or setting. In the Middle East it was Accadian, then Aramaic, then Arabic and finally the Ottoman Turkish; in some parts of Eurasia and North Africa Greek was the lingua franca for more than a millennium after the death of Alexander the Great. In East Asia classical Chinese played a similar role for thousands of years, mainly in a written form, until the late 19th century, whereas throughout much of the American continent, from California to Patagonia, Spanish has been used since the age of exploration. After the Napoleonic wars French served as the lingua franca of imperial diplomacy, as well as the principal choice of communication among the European aristocracy. More recently, for a short period (about four decades starting from 1945) Russian enjoyed similar importance in the Soviet bloc, stretching from East Germany to Mongolia. While virtually not a spoken tongue, Latin served as a key language of religion, government and scholarship throughout Europe of the medieval era, and as late as 1687 Isaac Newton wrote his first major work, Principia, in this language
but not his second!

English as a Lingua Franca The rise of English during the last two centuries to its present position has been nothing less than spectacular. In 1780 the second American president, John Adams, predicted that English is destined ‘to be the next and succeeding centuries more generally the language of the world than Latin was in the past or French in the present time’ (quoted from McCrum et al., 1986: 239). Adams reasoned that the increasing population in America, its inhabitants’ universal connection with their mother countries, and the global influence of England would inevitably make English a leading language. The realisation of this prophecy was not as self-evident as it seems in retrospect today, even for the mere fact that in 1780 English had fewer than 15 million speakers, spread sparsely over England, Scotland, Ireland, the USA, Canada and the Caribbean. Half a century later the German linguist Jacob Grimm stated that English ‘may

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with all right be called a world language; and, like the English people, appears destined hereafter to prevail with a sway more extensive even than its present over all the portions of the globe’ (quoted in Trench, 1881: 44). Neither Adams nor Grimm lived to see their prophecies come true, but a few decades later some early but promising precursors of English linguistic hegemony were more than visible. During the late 19th century English began to replace French as the lingua franca of Western Europe, and while Russian aristocrats regarded the latter as their language of choice well into the Bolshevik Revolution, their ruler, Tsar Nicholas II, displayed a clear preference for the former. Earlier, during the 18th and the 19th centuries, English had already established its position as the lingua franca of North America and the Indian subcontinent. Whereas in North America most of the population used English as their first language, in the Indian subcontinent only a small fraction did so. In the latter case English was the language of the British rulers but was gradually adopted by the multilingual locals for intergroup communication. British imperial hegemony and huge colonial possessions during the late 19th century were undoubtedly a major determinant in facilitating the spread of English at that time, but not the only one. After WWI, and particularly after WWII, American economic hegemony and growing political and cultural importance proved the main spur for the spread of English, and the USA became the cultural and linguist harbinger of the English language. In the postwar era the combined impact of these two nations has brought English to a new and unprecedented position, not only for its geographical spread and the number of its speakers, but for its overall significance. It has assumed the role of the world’s lingua franca. Today English is the preferred language of communication at virtually any international meeting hosting representatives of more than a number of nations, and at many regional meetings as well. English speakers can be found in almost any corner of the globe and English is now the dominant or at least one of the official languages in over 75 states and territories (Conrad & Fishman, 1977; Crystal, 2003b) in which at least 1.6 billion people live (Sullivan, 1991). More than 70% of scientific publications and the vast majority of the leading scientific publishers are at present in English (Ammon, 1996). Similarly, about 80% of Internet sites are in English, and most of the programming languages used are based on English. Furthermore, although the number of English speakers as a first language is approaching 400 million, and a similar number of speakers use it as a

Determinants of Borrowing from English and its Hegemony

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second language (mainly in the Indian subcontinent), it is possible that in sum nearly two billion of the approximately six billion people who inhabit the globe are able to communicate in English in varying levels of competence (Crystal, 2003b; Dalby, 2004). In this sense, English can be viewed, as McArthur (2002) suggested, as the sole representative of ‘a universalizing complex’
a new and extreme category on a continuity where the world’s languages are arranged. While English has many variants, it has emerged recently also in a new and generalised form known as International Standard English, which offers a standard and secured pattern of communication to all English speakers (McArthur, 2002). This pattern can be found on many of the services offered on the Internet (e.g. Google, America Online), in global media services (e.g. CNN, BBC), at airports and other locations where English is used in a multilingual context.

Research on the Global Spread of English: From World Englishes to English Loan Words In the last three decades much research has been conducted on the position of English as the world’s lingua franca and the processes associated with it. Many linguists have focused on description and analysis of the large number of varieties of Englishes used, in predominantly English-speaking countries, in places where English is still used as part of the British or American legacy, and in any other culture (e.g. Crystal, 2003b; Kachru, 1982, 1986, 1992; Viereck et al., 1984; Watts & Trudgill, 2002). The growing interest and academic importance of this topic is evident in the activity of two academic journals, both established in the early 1980s: English World-Wide: A Journal of Varieties of English and World Englishes. The former focuses on the dialectology and sociolinguistics of the English-speaking communities (native and second-language speakers), while the latter is committed to the study of varieties of English in their distinctive cultural, sociolinguistic and educational contexts, with emphasis on cross-cultural perspectives and identities. A related field of research is the study of English as a foreign second language, often simply known as English Language Teaching (ELT) or Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL). The main focus in this field is on teaching English to non-native speakers, and although this goal is purely educational, it enhances the diffusion of English as a global lingua franca. There are thousands of publications on this topic, including the academic journal Teaching English as a Second or Foreign

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Language (TESL-EJ)
a quarterly disseminated electronically from Berkeley, California, since 1994. The concept of ‘English as a second language’ represents for many its positive facet: a language bringing people together and mediating between cultures in conflict. This has been one of the major goals of teaching this language for many years at schools all over the world (cf. Block & Cameron, 2001). For others, however, the same type of English, an all-out global mode of communication, is not always seen as a blessing but as a threat. Some see it as the epitome of Anglo-American imperialism, the bridgehead of a linguistic invasion aimed at world domination, or at least a constant reminder of its ongoing postcolonial legacy (e.g. Pennycook, 1994, 1998; Phillipson, 1992). Others regard globalising English as undemocratic since it creates a structure of linguistic hierarchy, which enhances the cultural dominance of English-speaking countries, particularly the USA and Britain (e.g. Tsuda, 1986, 2000). In the current critical milieu, it is no wonder that the spread of English is also associated with language death, a phenomenon that takes place in several forms. Contact with English-speaking people has led in some cases to marginalisation of local languages, as has occurred among speakers of various Austronesian languages in the Pacific Ocean, and in other cases to the virtual eradication of the local population, thereby bringing about the death of their language as well, as has happened in North America and Australia (e.g. Crystal, 2000; Nettle & Romaine, 2000). Another aspect of the spread of English is research on codeswitching and codemixing, which form the actual context in which borrowings are used. Codeswitching is the use of various linguistic units, usually but not only from two participating grammatical systems within a speech event, and its usage is motivated by social and psychological factors (Ritchie & Bhatia, 2004). Codemixing is similar in form and motives to codeswitching, but whereas the former is intrasentential and is constrained by grammatical principles, the latter is intersentential and may be subject to discourse principles (Ritchie & Bhatia, 2004). In the present framework, we do not need to contrast codeswitching with codemixing. Indeed some scholars (e.g. Gumperz, 1982) consider them one entity, a ‘situational shifting’. In any case, codeswitching and
mixing phenomena alike provide the theoretical linguistic basis for the use of borrowed words in the absorbing language. The alter ego of English in this context is the plethora of all the remaining languages of the world, and indeed much research is devoted to the attitudes of other languages to English. Although there are perhaps

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more than 6000 of them, only a few hundred have more than one million speakers, and far fewer than a hundred languages receive academic attention regarding their current plight (cf. Flaitz, 1988 on the attitude to French). This attention focuses on one level on codeswitching, and on another level on language planning and policy regarding the incorporation of English lexicon. While the usage of English lexicon in various languages has been the focus of much research, some has been done on the rejection of English lexicon, know as purism. The study of codeswitching and codemixing has emerged mainly due to research on its occurrence in English mixed/switched with another language (e.g. Blom & Gumperz, 1972) and is thus related to our present theme. Over time, various theories of codeswitching and mixing structures and functions have developed (MacSwan, 2004). Studies of bilingual/trilingual/multilingual language acquisition have shown that codeswitching and codemixing exist in young children’s speech from a very early age (McLaughlin, 1984; Zentella, 1997) and are assumed to be due to the structuring of the language systems in the brain and the efficiency with which each language structure can be applied when necessary. This structuring operates in young and adult bilingual speakers. Based on these facts, the borrowing process and loan word use are natural, which explains their frequency in bilingual communication. As codeswitching and codemixing reflect the psycholinguistic effect of the interaction between languages on bilingual speakers’ behaviour, they complement the sociolinguistic effect of societal language policy on speakers’ linguistic behaviour. The spread of English is closely related to policies and attitudes of speakers of those languages, as well as some institutions designated to deal with language planning, that is, with the deliberate, systematic change of language form or use (cf. Bauman, 2004; Kaplan & Baldauf, 1997; Spolsky 2004; Wright, 2004). Such policies are an important aspect of the reception of English, either by encouraging its acceptance or by rejecting it through legal and cultural means. This issue has also benefited from the activity of the academic journal Language Problems and Language Planning (LPLP). This journal focuses on language policy and relationships within and among language communities, particularly in international contexts, and in the adaptation, manipulation and standardisation of languages for international use. Purism, a derivative and often the consequence of language policy, appears at present to have a strong association with English, at least indirectly. This is because some perceive it as a destructive check to the further spread of English, while others see it as a necessary evil (e.g. Pergnier, 1989). There have been a

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number of studies on policies of purism (e.g. Jernudd & Shapiro, 1989; Thomas, 1991), especially in France and Germany (e.g. de Saint-Robert, 2000; Langer & Davies, 2005; Plu¨mer, 2000), but also in some other nations (e.g. Wexler, 1974). Several studies have examined the dissemination of English use in general and English loan words in particular, resulting in some cases in dictionaries or other compilations, for example, in French and Japanese (e.g. Go¨rlach, 2003; Ho¨fler, 1982; Kamiya, 1994; Lorenzo, 1996; Miura, 1979; Picone, 1996). In a more inquisitive though less systematic manner, Fishman, Cooper and Conrad conducted the first substantial worldwide survey on the spread of English, and in 1977 published their findings (Fishman et al., 1977a). Their book comprised miscellaneous case studies, some descriptive, others more quantitative; overall, they illuminated the growing position of English. A decade later Viereck and Bald (1986) edited another wide-ranging book on the contact of English with other languages. Their impressive volume dealt with 29 societies on four continents, but it neither examined them systematically nor attempted to draw any general conclusions from the vast evidence it adduced. Later Phillipson (1992) examined the spread of English in a comparative study, but his focus on colonialism intentionally excluded the examination of other, perhaps not less important, factors that may determine attitudes to English. More insightful for our case is the study on the spread of English conducted by Rubal-Lopez (1991; Fishman & Rubal-Lopez, 1992) for her doctoral dissertation. Using quantifiable indicators and regression analysis of sundry variables in 121 non-English-mother-tongue countries, the study confirms the initial hypothesis that linguistic heterogeneity, colonialism and economic development are the most significant predictors of the spread of English. Rubal-Lopez also identified the degree of English-language institutionalisation, the lack of developmental orientation and the percentage of students sent to acquire their education in Anglo-American institutions as additional predictors. Nineteen years after their first book, Fishman and Conrad, this time together with RubalLopez (1996), edited another grand survey on the status of English in the 1990s. Based on 20 case studies of different former British and American colonies, their volume confirmed its assumption that English was ‘still’ spreading in the non-English-mother-tongue world, and that this spread was not orchestrated in an exploitative manner but due to AngloAmerican engagement in the modern global economy. Fishman and his associates observed additional forces outside the English world, such as

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tertiary education and local mass media, which contribute to this ongoing process. In an extension of her original study, Rubal-Lopez (1996) examined the effect of a long list of parameters (independent variables) on four features (dependent variables) reflecting the spread of English in a given country: (1) the percentage of tertiary students studying in English-mother-tongue countries; (2) the percentage of English-language newspapers; (3) the percentage of the value of printed matter exported from the USA; (4) the percentage of English book titles published. While this study is commendable for its scope, methodology and conclusions, it seems that the author did not distinguish sufficiently between determinants and mediating variables correlated with the spread of English. The level of tourism to Anglophone countries, to take one example, may increase the tendency to use English simply for the need to communicate. However, usually it is also associated with a relatively strong economy and an openness characterising developed democratic values
variables with similar if not more significant causal relations with the spread of English. As for the spread of English loan words, the most extensive and systematic study from a comparative perspective has been the single research project led in the late 1990s by Go¨rlach, together with more than 20 scholars. This team examined the lexical impact of English on 16 major European languages, representing the various regions and language families of continental Europe, and produced a dictionary of some 4000 items (Go¨rlach, 2001) as well as an annotated bibliography of European Anglicisms (Go¨rlach, 2002a). Even more relevant for our study, Go¨rlach and his team authored a highly systematic summary of the influence of English on those languages (Go¨rlach, 2002b). Each chapter consists of a history of contact of the language under discussion with English, pronunciation and spelling of Anglicisms common in that language, their morphology, their usage and the way borrowing affects the meaning of loan words. This research project is unquestionably a model for any future study of Anglicisms and the effect of English on other languages. Nonetheless, to date no comprehensive cross-cultural comparative and systematic study has been conducted to examine the motives for and determinants of borrowing English loan words. One exception is Kowner and Rosenhouse (2001), who compared attitudes to English loan words in Japan and Israel, thereby providing an explicit but preliminary insight into a number of determinants of policies and attitudes to lexical borrowing across cultures.

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Lexical Borrowing: Motives and Means of Dissemination Lexical borrowing is a widespread activity, practised ever since the first encounter between people speaking different languages in prehistoric times. It occurs when speakers of a language begin to incorporate into their own lexicon, or metaphorically ‘borrow’ (without the need for permission) a foreign word (‘loan word’). The process of borrowing requires at least some contact between the two languages, rudimentary understanding of the meaning of word and a minimal tendency to bilingualism. These nominal requirements may lead to occasional borrowing of a few words, but in many cases end with massive borrowing, amounting to thousands of words. This is the case with English, which adopted tens of thousands words from French following the Norman conquest of England in the Middle Ages, and with Modern Japanese, which has borrowed close to 30,000 loan words, mainly from English, since the onset of Japan’s modernisation in the latter half of the 19th century (cf. Hock & Joseph, 1996; McMahon, 1994). Lexical borrowing from English in modern Japanese reveals some of the general characteristics of the borrowing process. It covers, to mention only a few domains, 52% of flower names, 35% of vegetable names and 24% of animal names (Morimoto, 1978). At the same time, only a few adverbs or prepositions in Japanese are borrowed. A different and atypical situation is found in Hebrew, which in addition to many borrowed nouns, but not many plants or animal names, has adopted numerous adjectives and adverbs (Kowner & Rosenhouse, 2001). Indeed, languages tend to borrow mainly nouns, and to a lesser extend verbs and adjectives. They tend to resort to loan words in fields related to technology, sciences, leisure activities and fashion, but shun basic vocabulary such as natural geographic phenomena, pronouns and body parts. Several motives for adopting loan words are common to almost all languages, and all are relevant to English, thereby contributing further to its current position. All motives, we presume, are associated with some reward, either to the borrowing language or (at least) to the person using the loan words. The following three motives are the most fundamental, but their effects vary in different languages and cultures due to their interaction with other social and political circumstances as well as the character of their relations with English-speaking societies. Need to coin new terminology and concepts. Every living language faces a need for constant coining of new notions due to technological and cultural changes. Life involves the development of material and spiritual

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products of the given culture, or of others imported from a foreign culture. In certain periods the need for new notions is especially strong, as in the case of sudden exposure to a more advanced culture or in the case of accelerated technological change, as has in Western Europe since the 18th century and in other areas more recently. Borrowing words and terminology from another culture in which they are already established may satisfy this need partly or fully. English in this sense has been the perfect choice. Not only is it the mother tongue of some of the most advanced societies and developed economies, but it also has a rich vocabulary, perhaps the richest in the world, as a number of scholars have emphasised recently in accounting for the success of English (e.g. Bryson, 1990; Claiborne, 1983). Tendency to emulate a dominant group. Human groups, perhaps like primate groups in general, have the tendency to imitate others who seem worthy of emulation. Animals tend to imitate dominant individuals, whereas in mankind this tendency has been expanded to the cultural imitation of entire dominant groups. This association encompasses elements from the language of the dominant group. Tendency to create a special jargon in closed groups. Various groups in any culture seek ways to distinguish themselves from the rest of the population. The sociologist Georg Simmel (1904) postulated that fashions develop for this reason, and language has an important role in the creation of such differences. Borrowing from a prestigious language often serves as a means to highlight the uniqueness and progress of the borrowing group, which is often a closed elite group. This trend is typical among professional groups, such as physicians, engineers and lawyers, but also among youth groups, who use a prestigious foreign language as a marker of uniqueness. Apart from providing elevated status, borrowing such terms often reflects the need to communicate topics that are unknown and uninteresting for those who are not members in the same professional or social group. English
the language used at almost any international professional meeting but also at the leading venues of current popular culture
offers a rich vocabulary for the creation of such jargon. The dissemination of English loan words depends also on the availability of means of communication. At present the following means seem the most relevant. Direct communication. The level of exposure to English due to colonisation is evidently connected to lexical borrowing (Rubal-Lopez, 1996). Direct communication may also occur due to the military presence of troops from an English-speaking country. More commonly is may be due to tourism from an English-speaking country to a non-English-speaking

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country or vice versa, with the wish of tourists from non-Englishspeaking countries to communicate with their English-speaking hosts. Mass media. Since the early 20th century, English-speaking countries, the USA in particular, have led many trends in the global dissemination of information and popular culture. This was facilitated by radio broadcasting in English (e.g. the BBC, Voice of America), especially during WWII. The successful American film industry has presented the American lifestyle, along with its language, practically to the whole world. Later on, as the TV system developed, the role played by the movies reached spectators even in their homes. The last two decades witnessed the emergence of computers for personal use and the spread of the Internet. Currently the electronic communication media, i.e. the Internet and the World Wide Web, have become the central means of cultural influence of the English-speaking community and a motive for learning its language. The media tend to disseminate the vocabulary of the modern discourse in general and the elite’s discourse in particular, which is inevitably the English vocabulary. In many countries Englishspeaking channels are available because of their relatively low price and their cultural attractiveness. The education system. The education system serves as a central socialisation agent of the community for the dissemination of traditional and modern content and topics. In some cases the education system enhances and encourages the acquisition and dissemination of foreign words that have been absorbed by certain social classes, and in many other cases it is the main means for learning English as a second language. However, in cultures where an obvious purist tendency exists, the education system may serve to decrease the use of words borrowed from English.

Determinants of Adoption of English Loan Words in Contemporary World Languages Numerous determinants exist for borrowing English vocabulary by other languages, the majority of which are by-products of the motives and means presented above. The following section presents some of the major determinants, which will be examined in detail in each of the case studies in the subsequent chapters. Modernisation and economic development. The borrowing process involves contacts between members of various societies, including travelling abroad and direct exposure to English and its native speakers. In addition, societies entering modernisation are under greater pressure for lexical terminology. Economic development, and especially exporting

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to Anglophone countries, were found to increase pressure for use of English in schools (Fishman et al., 1977b). Prestige. Linguistic adoption partly stems from a tendency to imitate a dominant group speaking a language considered to enjoy greater prestige than the speaker’s native language. Lexical borrowing from such a group carries with it some of the concomitant prestige. Its acquisition depends on the cultural and historical background of the contacts between the borrowing language and English, the cultural and economic gaps between them, and the existence of a competing cultural-linguistic community that may decrease the effect of borrowing from English. The need for greater prestige associated with lexical borrowing is often associated with intragroup motivation, but occasionally it may be relevant for intergroup relations, notably in an ethnically heterogeneous society. Ethnic and linguistic diversity. In places where ethnic and linguistic heterogeneity exist (e.g. India, African countries, former Yugoslavia, Israel), English can serve as a partially or fully linking language between the different language communities (cf. Fishman et al., 1977b). The penetration of English as a second (or third) language strengthens the use of English vocabulary in the local language. Changes in the status of one local language within a political or social framework may strengthen or weaken the use of English for communication between speakers of different language communities. Nationalism. Nationalistic beliefs and policies tend to strengthen language purism and weaken the tendency to adopt loan words. French policies at present are only a mild example of this tendency; in the 1930s it was imperial Japan that attempted to drive out English words from its national language. Cultural threat. Perceptions of cultural threat may also yield pressures toward linguistic purism simultaneously aimed at weakening the penetration of the English language. Developments in Israel and France, for example, may serve as examples of such defensive sentiments. National character. Communal psychological features, such as obedience and conformity by the language community, may enhance processes of lexical borrowing, as witnessed in Japan, for example. In other periods this feature may lead the same community to processes of purism. Existence of regulatory linguistic establishments. Language academies are meant to help the national language by creating a language policy as part of the attempt to strengthen nationalism. Thus, language academies tend to enhance purism and to weaken linguistic adoption of loan words by coining original substitutes. The Academy of Language in Addis Ababa is a good example of this role. The closure of this institution in 1991 for

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political reasons helped to weaken the status of Amharic and strengthen processes of English word adoption in Ethiopia (Teferra, 2002). At the same time, regulatory linguistic institutions may also help by post factum confirmation of long established words in the language borrowed from English and their dissemination in official publications. But note that the official attitude of language academies to foreign word borrowing often contradicts the actual behaviour of the language speakers, who unwittingly absorb the foreign words.

Hypotheses To create a framework for a comparative study, we use the foregoing analysis to derive several predictions regarding the attitudes to English loan words discovered in our case studies. Our predictions relate to three aspects of the borrowing process: A. Predictions related to the fundamental motives for borrowing: 1. The greater the need to coin new terminology, the greater the tendency to borrow English loan words. 2. The greater the tendency in a given society to emulate other groups, the greater the tendency to borrow English loan words. 3. The more specialised and closed a group (society) is, the greater is its tendency to borrow English loan words. B.

Predictions related to means of dissemination:

4. The more contacts a society has with Anglo-American culture and the English language, past (e.g. through colonial rule) and/or present (e.g. tourism, Anglo-American military or economic presence), the greater the tendency to borrow English loan words. 5. The more exposed a society is at present to English via the mass media (TV programs, films, satellite channels, English-language newspapers), the greater the tendency to borrow English loan words. 6. The more advanced the educational system, higher education in particular, the greater the tendency to borrow English loan words. This is also valid for tertiary education: the greater the number and ratio of students studying in Anglo-American institutions of higher education, the greater their tendency to borrow English loan words even when they are back in their home countries. C.

Predictions related to features of borrowing:

7. The more recent the stage of modernisation in a given society, the greater its need for an updated and fresh vocabulary.

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8.

9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

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The higher the prestige of English in a given society, the higher the chances of its linguistic adoption. More specifically, the closer the contacts between the borrowing language and the English language, the more extensive the borrowing from English. The wider the cultural and economic gaps between the two languages, and the lesser the influence of a competing cultural-linguistic community, the stronger the effect of this determinant. The greater the ethnic heterogeneity and linguistic diversity in a given society, the greater the tendency to resort to English and to adopt English loan words. The weaker nationalistic beliefs and policies, the greater the propensity to borrow loan words. The lesser the perception of cultural threat in a given culture, particularly vis-a`-vis the English language and the Anglo-American culture, the greater the tendency to resort to lexical borrowing from English. The greater the conformity and obedience in a given society, the greater the capacity to adopt lexical loan words, if this is the cultural trend at the time. The lesser the control of regulatory linguistic institutions, the greater the tendency to resort to lexical borrowing from English. If borrowing from English is national policy, the greater the control of the regulatory institutions the greater the tendency to resort to lexical borrowing from English.

The Present Book This volume was conceived to account for determinants of and motives for contemporary lexical borrowing from English, using a comparative approach and a broad cross-cultural perspective. By systematically analysing a large number of case studies of different languages used in a large variety of countries, we sought to isolate for the first time a number of enhancing or inhibiting factors that may explain the current pattern of borrowing from English, and to understand the way they interplay. This is facilitated by a careful choice of languages and cultures, which represent a wide variety of language families, political systems, economic developmental stages and historic relations with the English language and the Anglo-American world. This process uses lexical items from one (dominant, superstratum) language within the grammatical system of another (subdued) language.

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The twelve case studies in the present volume describe processes in certain languages as case studies which are structured in a similar fashion, in order to facilitate a thematic comparison. These chapters are limited to single lexical items, namely words, and the processes involved in them, largely leaving out other domains such as syntax. Although the impact of English is clearly not limited only to one section of vocabulary or language structure, this focus was imposed on the authors of the chapters to allow interlingual comparisons and concentrate on the determinants of lexical borrowing and the linguistic and cultural impact of this process. While the languages discussed in the 12 chapters below are only a tiny portion of the world languages, they were carefully selected to represent six different language families and subgroups: Indo-European (French, Dutch, Persian, Icelandic and some Indian languages), Semitic (Hebrew, Arabic and Amharic), Finno-Ugric (Hungarian), Sino-Tibetan (Chinese in Taiwan) and Altaic (Japanese). Among these, Indian languages, and to a lesser extent Hebrew and Arabic, are languages spoken in countries which were under British rule in the past, whereas Japan was under American occupation for almost seven years. We assumed that if basic linguistic features and processes are revealed and converge to yield similar results when languages so different are compared, they will probably indicate major common (universal) sources of these processes. In the concluding chapter we examine our basic assumptions and attempt to show that this path is not only interesting but also fruitful.

Chapter 2

Icelandic: Phonosemantic Matching YAIR SAPIR and GHIL‘AD ZUCKERMANN

In this chapter we account for phonosemantic matching (PSM; see Zuckermann, 1999, 2000, 2003a, 2003b, 2005a; ‘echoing word-formation’ in Sapir, 2008) in Icelandic. We will provide an overview of the Icelandic language, its structure, language planning and word-formation, and introduce the mechanism of PSM in general. We then illustrate two aspects of Icelandic PSM: word-formation, as PSM is one of many Icelandic word-formation types, and typology, by demonstrating PSM in other languages. PSM is divided into two main categories: PSM through a preexistent form and PSM through a new form. Finally, we present the conclusions and theoretical implications of this chapter. Sapir (2008) suggests the following taxonomy of the sources used to form new words in the language. It will help us in tracing the position of PSM in the system: 1. Zero source. Lexemes reproduced from this source are denoted by the established term ex nihilo (Latin ‘from nothing’), implying that they are not based on any preexistent lexical material. 2. Sound source. Lexemes reproduced from this source are denoted by the new term ex sono (Latin ‘from sound’) and are reproductions of sounds or sound symbolism. 3. The foreign vocabulary. Lexemes reproduced from this source are denoted by the new term ex externo (Latin ‘from the outside’). 4. The native vocabulary. Lexemes reproduced from this source are denoted by the new term ex interno (Latin ‘from the inside’). Sapir (2008) defines reproduction as a process ‘by which one or several bases retain their features and status in the system but are ‘‘copied’’ or ‘‘reduplicated’’ to form a new word’. Hence, words are not ‘borrowed’, ‘taken’ or ‘imported’ from one language to the other, but are rather reproduced ex externo (i.e. from the foreign vocabulary). Likewise, 19

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native words can be reproduced with a new sense to form a new word, or else by compounding, derivation etc., and can thus be defined as reproduced ex interno (i.e., from the native vocabulary). Using these terms not only renders a more realistic image of word-formation, but avoids conflicts when defining words that were ‘borrowed’ into the lexis but are at the same time considered ‘native’. Such words are defined as native words reproduced ex externo, i.e. from a lexis other than the native one. Whereas the first two sources are considered to be productive in a language’s initial stages, the two latter are considered to be productive throughout any stage of its evolution. Moreover, these sources, especially the foreign and native vocabulary, may be intercombined or bifurcated with each other in different ways. Calquing is based on a bifurcated source, as an ex externo pattern is rendered by an ex interno form. For instance, English distance teaching was calqued into Icelandic fjarkennsla with identical meaning (fjar- ‘distant’ kennsla ‘teaching’). Back to PSM, this is also a type of word-formation based on a bifurcated source, as ex externo senses and phonemes are intercombined with similar ex interno senses and phonemes, in this way camouflaging the ex externo dimension.

The Icelandic Language Icelandic: From sagas to high-tech Icelandic is spoken by approximately 300,000 people, 280,000 of whom live in Iceland, where Icelandic is the official language. From being a poor, chiefly agricultural society until approximately a hundred years ago, Icelanders have gradually established themselves among the world’s leading nations in the areas of economy, welfare, average life expectancy, as well as in the number of computers, Internet connections and cellular phones per capita (see also Sapir, 2003: 33
34). The Icelandic language, which around the end of the 18th century was best spoken in the rural areas of the island and was inferior to Danish, the officialese and likewise the language of culture and sciences, is today a full-fledged and stable language, functioning as the only official language of the Republic of Iceland. The language is rather consolidated, due to the fact that it lacks genuine dialects. Genetically, Icelandic is a Scandinavian or North Germanic language. It emerged from the Old West Scandinavian dialects that were brought to Iceland with the chiefly Norwegian settlers between 870 and 930 AD. To begin with, the language varieties spoken in Iceland and South Western

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Norway did not differ remarkably from each other. However, a couple of centuries later, they began to evolve in separate directions. Today, Icelandic and the two Norwegian languages (bokma˚l and nynorsk) are no longer mutually intelligible. Moreover, Contemporary Norwegian, together with Danish and Norwegian, is often classified as a Continental Scandinavian language, whereas Icelandic and Faroese are considered Insular Scandinavian languages. The canon of Icelandic Saga and Edda literature from the 12th and 13th centuries includes tales from the Scandinavian mythology, stories about the colonisation of Iceland and likewise about the Norwegian kings. These resources constitute the cornerstone in the further development of both Icelandic literature and language and turned out to be a most useful resource for Icelandic, as it re-established itself as a fullfledged language. Icelandic is considered the most conservative Scandinavian language. No other old Scandinavian language or dialect has preserved its morphological structure, highly complex inflectional system of Old Scandinavian and the original Scandinavian vocabulary as Icelandic has. With some training, Icelanders can today read and understand the old Sagas and Eddas. The situation could be compared to that of Classical and Israeli Hebrew (or ‘Israeli’
Zuckermann, 1999, 2005b), which has also constituted an important lexical source during the revival and standardisation of the language in modern times (cf. Sapir, 2003: 33
36). The influence of the Saga and Edda language and style is still notable today in Icelandic lexical elements reproduced in the 19th and 20th centuries, either in a shifted or an expanded meaning. One classical example is the word for ‘telephone’, sı´mi. This word appears both in the form sı´mi (masculine) and sı´ma (neutrum) in Old Icelandic, probably in the meaning ‘thread, rope’. As an archaism, it was revived, or ‘recycled’, by language planners, providing it with the new sense ‘telephone’ (a socalled neo-archaism (Sapir, 2008)). Sı´mi, allegedly reintroduced by Pa´lmi Pa´lsson in 1896, has, in turn, been productive in the formation of many derivations and compounds ever since. The structure of the language Icelandic nouns and adjectives are either weak or strong. There are three genders (masculine, feminine and neutral), two numbers (singular and plural) and four grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, dative and genitive). The choice of case is dictated by syntactic factors.

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Grammatical cases are marked by zero, suffixes and/or umlaut. Icelandic does not mark indefiniteness. Thus, hestur, meaning ‘horse’ or ‘a horse’, is the nominative form and hest is the accusative. The definite article of a noun is marked by an enclitic suffix, as in hesturinn horse-DEF ‘the horse’. Adjectives agree in number, gender, case and definiteness with the nouns they modify. Strong adjectives are indefinite, e.g. sto´r hestur ‘(a) big horse’, whereas weak adjectives express definitiveness, e.g. sto´ri hesturinn ‘big-DEF horse-DEF’ or hinn sto´ri hestur ‘the big-DEF horse’. Adjectives are likewise declined in grades. Adverbs often have an identical form to the neutral adjective form, e.g. hraður (basic form) ‘quick, speedy’, hratt (neutral form and adverb) ‘quickly, speedily’ and may, like adjectives, be declined in grades. Icelandic verbs follow to a large extent the Germanic verbal system, divided into weak and strong verbs, of which the strong verbs are, in turn, divided into seven ablaut groups and characterised by the lack of a dental suffix in the imperfect and perfect tense. The weak verbs are characterised by a dental suffix in the imperfect and perfect. Verbs are conjugated in the indicative, conjunctive and imperative moods, active and passive voice, present, imperfect and perfect tense. Icelandic is a head-first language with the usual constituent order AVO/SV. Within phonetics and phonology, Icelandic has been innovative. It thus differs greatly from e.g. Norwegian and Swedish. To name just a few features, it has the peculiarity of possessing both long and short diphthongs. Icelandic possesses both voiced and voiceless nasals and liquids. Stops are not divided into voiced and voiceless, but rather into fortes and lenes. However, voiced and voiceless dental fricatives are preserved and marked as Bð
/ð/ and Bþ
/u/, respectively. In common with most other Scandinavian languages and dialects Icelandic has the loss of /w/, nasal vowels, as well as the loss of the old system of ¨ lvdalska, syllable quantity, features still preserved in Elfdalian (or A spoken in Northern Dalecarlia, Sweden). On the prosodic level, Icelandic has lost the distinction between two tonal accents, but has preserved the stress on the first syllable also in prefixes and words ex externo. As Knu´tsson (1993) points out, Icelandic consists mainly of monosyllabic morphemes, as does Old English. Moreover, Icelandic tends to retain vowel-quantity in unstressed words. Hence, the Icelandic morphemic structure has remained largely explicit and most Icelandic compounds retain the identity of their components.

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Icelandic re-established Due to centuries of Danish rule, Icelandic has not only become highly influenced by the Danish language, but according to reports from the mid-18th to mid-19th centuries, the language in the harbours and in the capital Reykjavik was a mixed Dano-Icelandic variety (Otto´sson, 1990: 29
52). Growing interest in the Old Icelandic manuscripts overseas and an increasing national awakening gave rise to calls for the preservation of the language and to its ‘cleansing’ from its ex externo elements. These calls were embodied in the declaration made by Hið ı´slenska lærdo´mslistafe´lag (The Icelandic Society for Learned Arts), a group of Icelandic students in Copenhagen that formulated an official and puristically oriented language policy in 1780. Even at the beginning of the 19th century, the Danish linguist and Icelandophile Rasmus Rask predicted that Icelandic would vanish within a hundred years in Reykjavik and within two hundred years in the rest of the country, should nothing be done to save the language. In its statutes the above group writes as follows (in English translation): 5. Likewise, the Society shall treasure and preserve the Norse tongue as a beautiful, noble language, which has been spoken in the Nordic countries for a long time, and seek to cleanse the same from foreign words and expressions which have now begun to corrupt it. Therefore, in the Society’s publications, foreign words shall not be used about sports, tools or anything else, insofar as one may find other old or Mediaeval Norse terms. 6. Therefore, instead of such foreign words one may coin new words, compounded of other Norse [words], which explain well the nature of the object that they are to denote; in doing this, one should examine well the rules pertaining to and employed in this language as to the structure of good, old words; such words should be given a clear explanation and translation in order that they become easily comprehensible for the public. 7. However, such words that have been used in writings in the thirteenth or in the fourteenth century may be retained, even if they do not have their provenance in the Norse tongue, but be originally from foreign nations, when no other more customary or better and beautiful [words] exist otherwise. (Halldo´rsson, 1971: 223) The declared puristic orientation that accompanied language planning in that period left its traces on the Icelandic language and vocabulary. Other noteworthy motives for conservative language planning are

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18th- and 19th-century Enlightenment, a swift transformation from poverty and agricultural lifestyle into prosperity and industrialisation in the 20th century and, finally, globalisation and high technology since the middle of the 20th century. An extended conceptual and material world has consequently demanded an extended Icelandic lexis. Moreover, reproduction ex interno helped strengthen national consciousness and pride, or at least what was conceived as elements ex interno, often at the cost of old formations ex externo, based on Danish. However, Icelandic language purism was not as radical as might be assumed. As mentioned in paragraph 7 in the Society’s statutes, Medieval words that had no good substitute remained in the language. Lexemes such as prestur ‘priest’, kirkja ‘church’ and other were so enrooted and domesticated, that uprooting them would be conceived by the speech community as an extreme measure and could become counterproductive and alienate people from the mother tongue. Although based ex externo, such old words have been and still are regarded as fully native. The combination of a declared language policy and the need for new publications in Icelandic within scholarly and ideological domains have given rise to a large-scale formation ex interno (Icelandic ny´yrðasmı´ð), or at least apparently ex interno, neology that has slowly but surely become an important national sport in Iceland. Even though the work of preserving and ‘cleansing’ the language has been applied to grammar and even pronunciation, its focus has nonetheless been undoubtedly the lexis. Danish, and for the past decades also English, are often still present ‘behind’ word-formation, i.e. as sources for calques and PSM, within phraseology, in the colloquial language and in some professional jargons. Through Iceland’s political sovereignty in 1918, full independence in 1944 and the establishment of the Icelandic Language Council, I´slensk ma´lnefnd, in 1964, the status of the Icelandic language has been reinforced and language planning has ever since been carried out through legislation. The Council works with language planning and language preservation, activities run on a daily basis by its secretariat, The Icelandic Language Institute, I´slensk ma´lsto¨ð, founded in 1985. The Language Institute offers instructions and consultation for the language users and works with neology and terminology. In the terminological work around 30 different committees are engaged within different specialised domains. However, the language authorities have not been working alone. Mass media, specialists within different domains and laymen have all played an important role in applying the puristic language policy, not only by actively coining ex interno, but also through contemplations and public debates. Due to the obvious success of the Icelandic puristic language

Icelandic: Phonosemantic Matching

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policy, the language can be regarded today as one of the most, if not the most, puristically oriented living languages. Language contact and linguistic purism Due to centuries of Danish rule in Iceland, Danish has been the major immediate source language (SL) for reproductions ex externo in Icelandic. Conscious and puristically oriented language planning has not merely constituted an obstacle to the further expansion of Danish language use on the cost of Icelandic, but even led to minimising the preexistent Danish interference in Icelandic. Albeit a diminished influence on Modern Icelandic, Danish can still be considered the major immediate SL for reproductions ex externo in Icelandic throughout time. However, diminished Danish interference should not be seen solely as the result of Icelandic puristic activity, but also a consequence of the political changes in Iceland. Even though large-scale trade with Britain began already at the end of the 19th century (Karlsson, 2000: 244), considerable English language influence began only in the middle of the 20th century. British occupation in 1940 and full independence in 1944 exposed the Icelandic society to English and American culture, gradually placing English as the first SL for Icelandic and thus the primary source for reproduction ex externo on the cost of Danish (Sapir, 2008). But contacts with Britain and the English language are by no means new. Direct English influence on Icelandic, although minor, can be dated as far back as the 11th and 12th centuries, conveyed primarily by missionaries and Icelanders who studied in Britain, on the one hand, and through general religious spreading, on the other, often mediated by Norway. Additionally, cultural terms spreading between different European languages reached Iceland, usually conveyed by Norwegian or Icelandic merchants. Although trade contacts between Iceland and England were intensive in the first half of the 15th century, Old and Middle English influence on Icelandic was minor. Due to the Danish trade monopoly imposed on Iceland in 1602, trade with Britain was kept marginal until the 20th century. English and international words that entered the Icelandic language between the 17th and the 19th centuries were usually mediated by Danish. Notable English language influence on Icelandic began in the 1940s and has been growing ever since ´ skarsson, 2003: 70
71, 86; Sapir, 2008). In 1999, English replaced (O Danish as the first foreign language in Icelandic elementary schools. Through television, movies, computers and the Internet, English is

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ubiquitous in Icelandic everyday life. Most Icelanders subsequently leave school with a good active knowledge of English. Danish is slowly losing ground and many Icelanders today merely have a passive knowledge of that language, acquired as an obligatory subject at school. Whereas such traditionally oriented languages as Finnish and Hebrew have become more receptive to influence ex externo, Icelandic language planning is still considered to have preserved its traditional puristic spirit. Thomas (1991: 159) characterises linguistic purism in Finnish and Hebrew as ‘evolutionary purism’, and in Icelandic as ‘consistent, stable purism’ (Sapir, 2003: 41). To name a few examples, Icelandic has ex interno or apparent ex interno reproductions for such common internationalisms as ‘computer’ to¨lva, ‘president’ forseti, ‘psychology’ sa´lfræði, ‘telephone’ sı´mi and ‘television’ sjo´nvarp. In spite of its successfully persistent linguistic purism, Icelandic is confronting immense challenges posed by English. For instance, in the relatively new domain of computers, Icelandic speakers turn out to use more Englishisms than Swedish speakers do, although in general Swedish has rather liberal and outgoing language planning. This can be explained by the relatively scarce resources at the disposal of the authorities of an organised language community amounting to merely 280,000 persons, rendering it difficult to come up with Icelandic translations to frequently updated texts for operating systems, Internet and word-processing programs (Pa´lsson, 2003: 245; Sapir, 2003: 42). Even though the traditional puristic language planning was subject to open criticism and public debate in the 1970s and 1980s, it seems to enjoy a relatively broad consensus among Icelanders today (Kristinsson, 2001; Sandøy, 1985: 16
17). Word-formation In most languages, word-formation often involves reproduction ex interno, ex externo or a combination of both sources. Nowadays, American English is the source for ex externo reproduction in many of the world’s languages. However, when reproduction on a purely ex externo source is rejected as a principle by the speech community, as is the case of Icelandic, what alternative types of word-formation are, then, employed? In some languages, camouflaging the foreign dimension may be one solution. This type of word-formation involves ex interno cum ex externo elements. One such ‘mixed’ word-formation type that is at stake for the present chapter is ‘phonosemantic matching’ (PSM). Sapir’s (2008) survey of current Icelandic word-formation in newspaper material shows that out of 625 lexemes that entered the lexis after

Icelandic: Phonosemantic Matching

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1780, approximately 51% were reproduced ex interno, containing new forms and senses, whereas 15% were a result of a semantic shift, and merely 6% of the data were reproduced purely ex externo. Observing the bifurcated formation types, consisting of mixed ex interno cum ex externo reproductions, we find: 1. CALQUE to its different types, accounting for as much as 26% of the data. In calques, the form is reproduced ex interno, but the structure is reproduced ex externo, e.g. hugmynd Bhugur ‘mind’ mynd ‘picture’, calqued on older Danish tankebillede Btankebillede with identical meaning. 2. FORMAL HYBRIDITY, accounting for one occurrence, i.e. 0.2% of the data. Here, formal ex externo and ex interno elements are reproduced simultaneously, e.g. dulko´ða ‘to encrypt’ Bex interno dul- ‘secret’ex externo ko´ði ‘code’. 3. PSM, accounting for one occurrence, i.e. 0.2%, in the data. Here, ex externo and ex interno are combined both in form and content, i.e. on the phonological and semantic level, e.g. tækni ‘technology, technique’ are semantically and phonologically ex interno, reproduced from Icelandic tæki ‘tool’ and simultaneously ex externo, from Danish teknik ‘technology, technique’.

PSM and Previous Research If you ever go to a supermarket in Iceland, ask for the low-fat margarine Le´tt og laggott ‘light and to-the-point’. Just for your general knowledge, the name of this brand is a pun on the idiom stutt og laggott ‘short and to-the-point’. But besides the pun and the alliteration in Le´tt og laggott, there is another point here: the brand, imported from Sweden, is called there La¨tt och lagom ‘light and just enough’. By coming up with the Icelandic word laggott, which is phonetically similar to Swedish lagom, and by slightly changing the semantics of the whole phrase, the name Le´tt og laggott emerged, recognisable without difficulty to those who know the Swedish brand, with a semantic content that is very close to the Swedish one and that, moreover, makes sense to the Icelandic speaker. This is also how PSM works.1 PSM is widespread in two categories of language: 1. Puristically oriented languages, in which language planners attempt to replace undesirable elements ex externo, e.g. Finnish, Icelandic, Israeli Hebrew and Revolutionised Turkish; and

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2. Languages that use phono-logographic script, e.g. Chinese, as well as Japanese and Korean (the latter two when using Kanji or Hanja respectively), all of which are influenced by cultural superstratum languages, mainly English. Thus, Icelandic eyðni ‘AIDS’ is a PSM of English AIDS, using Icelandic eyða ‘to destroy’ and the nominal suffix -ni. This is but one example of what is, in fact, an important form of bifurcated reproduction, which can be observed in Icelandic, as in other languages. This phenomenon, which we call PSM, can be defined as a bifurcated reproduction ex externo and ex interno simultaneously, in which the element/s ex externo is matched with a phonetically and semantically similar preexistent autochthonous element/s ex interno. Thus, PSM may alternatively be defined as the entry of a neologism that preserves both the meaning and the approximate sound of the reproduced expression in the source language (SL) with the help of preexistent target language (TL) elements. Here, as well as throughout this chapter, neologism is used in its broader meaning, i.e. either an entirely new lexeme or a preexistent word whose meaning has been altered, resulting in a new sense. Figure 2.1 is a general illustration of this process. Figure 2.2 summarises the process with regard to Icelandic eyðni ‘AIDS’. Although this source of lexical enrichment exists in a variety of languages, it has not been systematically studied by linguists but rather dismissed with an honourable mention (see e.g. Heyd, 1954: 90; Sivan, 1963: 37
38, Toury, 1990 for Hebrew; Hansell, 1989; Lı˘, 1990; Luo´, 1950 on Chinese; and Ya´o, 1992 on Taiwan Mandarin; and see Zuckermann, 2003a). Also scholars of Icelandic word-formation seem to have left PSM

TL y ‘b’

Sl x ‘a’

TL(+PSM) y’ ‘a’’

y is phonetically similar to x b is similar to a y’ is based on y a’ is based on a

Figure 2.1 Phonosemantic matching

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Icelandic English

eyða ‘to destroy’

AIDS

+ -ni nominal suffix

Icelandic eyðni ‘AIDS’

Figure 2.2 Phonosemantic matching of AIDS in Icelandic

unnoticed. Jo´nsson presents the following taxonomy of contemporary Icelandic word-formation: 1. innlend la´n ‘native borrowings’, accounting for formations ex interno with new senses; 2. ny´myndanir ‘new creations’, accounting for derivatives, compounds and new stems ex interno; 3. erlend la´n ‘foreign borrowings’, accounting for formations ex externo (Jo´nsson, 2002b: 183
200). I´slensk orðsifjabo´k, the Icelandic etymological dictionary, only mentions the association between the ex interno and ex externo origin of PSMs (Magnu´sson, 1989: 286), but is not more specific than that. Groenke (1983) refers in passing to PSM. However, his taxonomy is vague and when addressing true PSM, he ignores its semantic dimension. In his taxonomy of present-day Icelandic neologisation, Groenke sums up five methods of word-formation: derivation, compounding, meaning expansion, reintroduction of archaisms with a new meaning and finally Lehnclipping ‘loan-clipping’. The latter, relevant to our chapter, is defined as follows:

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A fifth method has been applied quite often in recent times, that is, the formation of artificial words from segments of foreign patterns that can be conveniently compared to the graphic-phonic structure of Icelandic. In the case of borrowed segments, the segments cannot be analysed morphemically like in the source languages. Therefore, we prefer the term ‘clipping’. (English translation of Groenke, 1983) Groenke (1983: 148
150) cites two examples. The first one is berkill ‘tuberculosis’, in which the initial syllable tu- was clipped and the final syllable adapted to the Icelandic suffix -ill. This reportedly resulted in a new Icelandic formation, analysable as berk-ill, in which the formative berk has no meaning whatsoeverthe suffix -ill, otherwise denoting instrument or agent. Groenke’s second example is ratsja´ ‘radar’, ultimately based on the internationalism radar, in turn an acronym of radio detecting and ranging. Reproduced in Icelandic, -ra was, according to Groenke, clipped, and the Icelandic element -sja´ added, resulting in the form rat-sja´, thus analysable as consisting of rata ‘to find one’s way’, and -sja´, denoting ‘something, which sees’. Ratsja´, coined shortly after WWII, is not only graphically
phonetically dual, as Groenke suggests, alluding to radar and ratasja´ simultaneously, but also semantically dual. Thus, it is a satisfying manifestation of PSM. The traditional classifications of borrowing ignore PSM altogether, and categorise borrowing into either substitution or importation. However, we consider PSM as a distinct phenomenon, which operates through simultaneous substitution and importation devices. Recognising PSM carries important implications not only for lexicology and comparative historical linguistics, but also for sociolinguistics and cultural studies. For example, although Haugen (1950b) is considered by some to have presented the most complex typology of lexical borrowing (cf. Appel & Muysken, 1987: 164), his treatment hardly mentions PSM. He only briefly discusses ‘semantic loan’ (Haugen, 1950b: 214), which is related to only one specific category of PSM, namely ‘phono-semantic matching through a preexistent form’ and seems to have had in mind only one of many cases belonging to this category. Moreover, PSM does not fall within Haugen’s main types of reproduction ex externo or ‘borrowing’
substitution and importation.

PSM in Icelandic As noted, the original Icelandic morphemes are usually monosyllabic and polysyllabic words are analysable due to the conservative character

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of the language. Thus, when reproducing polysyllabic words ex externo, Icelandic may resemble tonal languages in the sense that some of these words may not only be perceived as phonetically native, but may also be partially or totally reanalysed semantically. Jo´nsson (2002a) calls these polysyllabic words sy´ndarsamsetningar ‘pseudo-compounds’, as the speakers are assumed to divide it in two and treat it as a compound stem, in that both syllables bear accents. As examples, Jo´nsson cites Icelandic abbadı´s ‘abbess’, which could be conceived as some kind of dı´s ‘Goddess; fairy’, and kro´ko´dı´ll ‘crocodile’ which could be conceived as some kind of dı´ll ‘speckle, spor’ (Jo´nsson, 2002a: 230). The first element can be identified as related to kro´kur ‘hook’. Knu´tsson (1993: 113) cites such examples as Icelandic a´bo´ti ‘abbot’, which can be reanalysed as a native formation reproduced of a´ ‘on’ bo´t ‘remedy’ i (inflectional suffix), and kafteinn ‘captain’, which can be reanalysed as a native formation reproduced of kaf ‘submersion’ teinn ‘rod’. Even though the semantic connection to the actual meanings of these ex externo formations is far-fetched, the next step is PSM, as in teknik
Icelandic tækni ‘technology, technique’ and bagel
beygla ‘bagel’, where logical semantic association is involved. With no special semantic content we find Icelandic harmonikka ‘accordion’, kakkalakki ‘cockroach’ and rabbarbari ‘rhubarb’. In 1780 Hið ı´slenska lærdo´mslistafe´lag (The Icelandic Society for Learned Arts) presented its declaration of principles of the Icelandic language, formulating an official and puristic language policy. Demonstrations of PSMs in Icelandic predate such puristic language planning. For instance, the Icelandic PSM guðspjall ‘gospel’ was formed upon Icelanders’ acceptance of Christianity in the year 1000. It is attested in written Icelandic in the 13th century Sturlunga Saga. Its formation involved a reproduction (1) ex externo of Old English go¯d-spel lit. ‘good tidings, good news’ on the one hand, and ex interno on Icelandic guð ‘God’spjall ‘speech’, lit. ‘God’s discourse’, on the other (Magnu´sson, 1989: 286). This can be summed up by the formula: ex externo (phonologysemantics)ex interno (phonologysemantics)ex externo cum ex internoPSM.2 PSM seems to have become much more productive in Icelandic appellatives after the turn of the 19th century. For example, Icelandic pa´fagaukur ‘parrot’, from Danish papegøje was combined with ex interno Icelandic pa´fi (in genitive) ‘pope’gaukur ‘cuckoo’, lit. ‘the pope’s cuckoo’ was first attested in the 1890s. Three steps are essential in the study of PSM: the collection of PSMs; the analytic classification of PSMs; and the analysis itself. One of the

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classifications that can help answer vital questions concerning the nature and function of PSM is lexicopoietic and is dealt with below as PSM through a preexistent form and PSM through a new form. It should be noted that during our field and library research we found a handful of PSMs in Icelandic. Our examples in these sections refer only to those related to English.

PSM through a preexistent form Consider Icelandic dalur ‘dollar’, reproduced ex interno from Icelandic dalur ‘daler’, an old Danish monetary unit, which was once in use in Iceland, and ex externo from English dollar. Note that the suffix -ur is not radical, but inflectional (Sapir, 2008). Similarly, Icelandic dapur ‘depressed, dejected, low in spirits’ was reproduced ex interno from Icelandic dapur ‘sad, downcast, woeful, weak, joyless’. Through the influence of Danish deprimeret and English depressed, the etymologically unrelated dapur has acquired the sense ‘depressed’, and its derivatives dapurleiki and depurð the meanings ‘depression’. Dapur and its derivatives share the first three consonants d, p, r with English or international depressed. Icelandic ı´mynd in the meaning ‘image, model, character being looked up to’ was reproduced ex interno from Icelandic ı´mynd ‘picture, image, symbol’. In the late 1960s this word seems to have acquired the additional sense ‘character being looked up to’ through ex externo English image (Sapir, 2008). Icelandic setur ‘centre’ was reproduced ex interno from Icelandic setur ‘seat; residence’ and ex externo from English centre. Through English influence, this noun seems to be used more and more frequently with the meaning ‘centre’, e.g. rannso´knarsetur ‘research centre’, na´mskeiðasetur ‘course centre’ and læknasetrið ‘medical centre’. Icelandic toga ‘to trawl’ (method of fishing) was reproduced ex interno from Icelandic toga ‘to pull, draw’ and ex externo from English trawl, thus sharing the phonemes /t/ or /T/ and /o/ and additionally a consonant with the English word. Likewise, the derivative togari ‘to trawl’agentive suffix was reproduced ex interno cum ex externo from English ‘trawler’. Both neologisms were coined by the director general of public health Guðmundir Bjo¨rnson, thus substituting ex externo trolla and trollari, respectively (Halldo´rsson, 1971: 233). They are first attested in the beginning of the 20th century. The English verb itself, to trawl, ultimately means ‘to draw, drag’.

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Incestuous PSM by semantic shifting PSM by semantic shifting is common in cases of cognates, i.e. the TL original word and the inducing SL word are semantically close. Consider the following: . (American) Portuguese humoroso ‘capricious’ changed its referent to ‘humorous, funny’ owing to the English surface-cognate humorous (Haugen, 1950b: 214), cf. Portuguese humoristico ‘humorous’. . French re´aliser ‘actualise, make real’ is increasingly used to mean ‘realise, conceive, apprehend’
induced by English realise (Deroy, 1956: 59), which derives from Italian realizzare or from the original French re´aliser. . Israeli Hebrew pulmu´s/pulmo´s/pu´lmus ‘polemic’ is a PSM
based on Mishnaic Hebrew [pu¯l’mu¯s] (also [pul’mu¯s]) ‘war’ (cf. Mishnah: SoTah 9:14)
of the internationalism polemic, cf. Israeli pole´mika, German Polemik, Yiddish pole´mik, Russian gjktvbrf pole´mika, Polish polemika and French pole´mique. Both Mishnaic Hebrew pulmu´s and the internationalism polemic can be traced to Greek po´lemos ‘battle, fight, war’ (cf. Kutscher, 1965: 31). However, the Mishnaic meaning ‘war’ is obsolete today (Zuckermann, 2003a: 95). Incestuous PSMs in Icelandic have an ex interno element that is etymologically cognate with the ex externo element from an IndoEuropean or a common Germanic phrase. Consider Icelandic beygla, which has acquired the additional sense ‘bagel’. It was thus reproduced ex interno from Icelandic beygla ‘dent’ (related to begyja ‘to bend, curve’ and baugur ‘ring’) and ex externo, it was reproduced immediately from English bagel, but ultimately from Yiddish beygl. Thus, it can be reanalysed both phonemically and semantically as a derivation of baugur ‘ring’ and as a reproduction of English bagel. Both ultimately go back to a common Germanic stem baugian. Icelandic heila ‘to heal, restore to health’ and etymologically cognate with English heal has expanded its meaning to comprise ‘to heal, restore to a spiritual wholeness’ by reproducing ex interno Icelandic heila and ex externo, the cognate English heal. Both go back to a common Germanic root. Icelandic staða ‘status’, a cognate of English status, was reproduced ex interno from Icelandic ‘stand, posture; position, post’ and ex externo on the internationalism status, by which it has expanded its meaning to embrace ‘status, position relative to others’ as in ‘social status’. They both go back to the Indo-European root *st(h)a¯, *st(h)e¯ ‘to stand’.

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Icelandic sto¨ð ‘station’, a cognate of English station, was reproduced ex interno from Icelandic sto¨ð. They both go back to the Indo-European root *st(h)a¯, *st(h)e¯ ‘to stand’. Originally, sto¨ð meant ‘place, position, place of landing’, but through meaning rapprochement it acquired in the 19th century the additional meaning ‘station’ and also ‘centre’ (currently often in the complex formation miðsto¨ð lit. ‘middle-place’). The meaning ‘station’ does not merely embrace concrete locations, such as train stations, but, as in English, also such establishments as radio and television stations. PSM introducing a new form The proposed Icelandic bifra ‘to vibrate’ and bifrari ‘vibrator’ based ex interno on Icelandic bifa ‘to tremble, shake’ and ex externo on English vibrate and vibrator, respectively. These words have apparently never come into use in Icelandic. Ex interno titra and titrari are used to denote ‘vibrtae’ and ‘vibrator’, respectively. Icelandic brokka´l ‘broccoli’, was reproduced ex interno from Icelandic brok ‘cotton grass’ka´l ‘plant from the genus Brassica’, cf. blo´mka´l ‘cauliflower’, hvı´tka´l ‘cabbage’, rauðka´l ‘red fairy’ and spergilka´l also ‘broccoli’. Ex externo, the ultimate source of the word is Italian broccoli, which is the plural diminutive form of brocco ‘sprout, shoot’ and the immediate one is English broccoli. Brokka´l is the least common of several competing synonyms in Icelandic. The most common one, reproduced ex interno, is spergilka´l, from spergill ‘aspargus’ka´l ‘plant from the genus Brassica’. Note that ex interno Finnish parsakaali ‘broccoli’ also has the literal meaning ‘asparagus’ (parsa)‘plant from the genus Brassica’. Broccoli has two other synonyms, that are adaptations ex externo into Icelandic, i.e. brokkolı´ and brokko´lı´ (Sapir, 2008). PSM of vegetable and fruit names is very common in many languages. Consider artichoke. This lexical item has been subject to PSMs in various languages, for example: North Italian articiocco, arciciocco (
English archychock)Barcicioffo BOld Italian *alcarcioffo (Modern Italian carciofo, carcioffo)
by association with the native Italian words arci- arch‘chief’, cioffo ‘horse-collar’ and ciocco ‘stump’. Consider also French artichaut/chou/chaud/chault/chaut
by assimilation to chou ‘cabbage’, chaud ‘warm’, hault, haut ‘high’. The Italian and French forms were Latinised in the 16th century as articoccus/coctus/cactus. English arti/horti/harty
choke/chock/choak is explained by the fact that ‘it chokes the garden’, ‘it chokes the heart’ or ‘its heart causes one to choke’. Note, however, that English choke ‘the

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mass of immature florets in the centre of an artichoke’ might have emerged from reanalysing the existent artichoke as having in its heart a ‘choke’, cf. Zuckermann (2003a: 213). Compare this with the Arabic compound PSM /’ard3i sˇawki/ ‘artichoke’ (Figure 2.3), Vernacular Arabic /’ard3i sˇo:ki/ in e.g. the Galilee. This form is used (inter alia) in Syria, Lebanon and Israel. It hybridises (i) the internationalism artichoke and (ii) Arabic /’ard3i/ ‘earthly, terrestrial, of ground’ (‘artichokes grow in earth’)˘ ˘ /sˇawki/ ‘thorny, prickly’ (cf. /sˇawk, sˇo:k/ ‘thorns’) (‘artichokes are thorny’). International artichoke ‘Cynara Scolymus’ goes back to Old Spanish alcarchofa (cf. Contemporary Spanish alcachofa, Portuguese alcachofra), from Spanish Arabic [/alxarsˇu:fa], from Arabic /al-xarsˇu:f/. Consequently, Arabic /’ard3i sˇawki/ closes a circle which began in Arabic with the etymologically unrelated /kharshu:f/.3 Returning to Icelandic, eyðni [eJðnI] ‘AIDS’, coined by Pa´ll Bergþo´rsson in 1985 (Jo´nsson, 1987), is a reproduction ex interno of Icelandic eyða ‘to eliminate, devastate’nominal suffix -ni and ex externo on English AIDS (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome), commonly rendered by Icelanders as [eJts]. Eyðni is one of half a dozen Icelandic words suggested in the 1980s to denote AIDS, the acronym of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Three neologisms in particular competed with each other: alnæmi (from al- ‘all, overall’næmi ‘sensitivity’), o´næmistæring (from o´næmi ‘immunity’tæring ‘phthisis; corrosion’) and eyðni. As eyðni began to gain ground, four doctors made a case against it, arguing that a lexeme alluding to destruction may have too negative connotations for the patients (Jo´nsson, 1987). Today, the formation ex externo AIDS and the formation ex interno alnæmi are most commonly used to denote AIDS in Icelandic. Interestingly, the same Englishism was phonosemantically matched in Modern Standard Chinese as aı`zı¯bı`ng, lit.

> Spanish Arabic > Old Spanish alcarchofa > > Italian alcarcioffo > North Italian arcicioffo > arciciocco > articiocco >> > International/English

Figure 2.3 Artichoke

artichoke

> Arabic (e.g. in Syria, Lebanon and Israel)

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‘love cause/develop/neutralise/spreaddisease’, i.e. ‘a disease caused by (making) love’. Figure 2.4 summarises these processes. Icelandic ko´rre´ttur ‘absolutely, totally correct’ was reproduced ex interno from the Icelandic etymologically opaque element ko´r-, appearing merely in ko´rvilla ‘grave error, total mistake’ re´ttur ‘right, correct’ (Heimir Pa´lsson pc) and ex externo from International correct. The first record of ko´rre´ttur is found in Paradı´sarheimt ‘Paradise Reclaimed’ from 1960, written by the Nobel Prize Winner for literature Halldo´r Laxness. Within the collected data of our Icelandic PSMs, this is the only lexeme that is not totally assimilated semantically with the ex externo lexeme, as the intensifier ko´r- ‘totally, absolutely’ from ko´rvilla is reproduced. Icelandic

Icelandic

eyðni AIDS

‘AIDS’

(Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome)

As eyðni began to gain ground in the 1980s, four doctors made a case against it, arguing that its connotation is too negative for the patients.

eyð ‘to destroy’ +

-ni nominal suffix

cf. the competing terms alnæmi (‘overall+sensitivity’), ónæmistæring (‘immunity+corrosion’) and AIDS

Modern Standard Chinese

aìzībìng ‘AIDS’

i.e. ‘a disease caused by (making) love’

Israeli

eyds ‘AIDS’

aì ‘love’ zī ‘cause/develop’ bìng ‘disease’

Israeli JOCULAR REANALYSIS

en yotér dfiká stam ‘There are no more “one-night stands’”

Figure 2.4 Phonosemantic matching of AIDS in Icelandic, Modern Standard Mandarin and Hebrew

Icelandic: Phonosemantic Matching

37

Icelandic ratsja´ ‘radar’ was reproduced ex interno from Old Icelandic rata ‘to find’ (
Modern Icelandic ‘to find one’s way’)-sja´ ‘-scope’ and ex externo from English radar. The element -sja´, reproduced from the verb sja´ ‘see’ has become equivalent to the internationalism -scope in several neologisms, as in hringsja´ ‘periscope’ (with hring- meaning ‘around, circum-, peri-’), rafsja´ ‘electroscope’ (with raf- meaning ‘electrical, electro-‘) and sma´sja´ ‘microscope’ (with sma´- meaning ‘little, small, micro-‘). The meaning of -sja´ ‘an instrument, which helps in seeing things’, probably goes back to a sole Old Icelandic word, i.e. skuggsja´, lit. ‘instrument, by whose means shadows are seen’, i.e. ‘mirror’. Interestingly, the very internationalism radar was domesticated in Modern Standard Chinese as le´ida´ (Ramsey, 1989: 60; Wu´, 1993: 1540), lit. ‘thunderreach’. Many Englishisms which are matched in Icelandic are also matched
independently
in other languages. Icelandic staðall ‘standard’ was reproduced ex interno from Icelandic staða ‘stand, posture; position, post’instrumental suffix -all and ex ´ lafur M. externo from the internationalism standard. It was coined by O ´ lafsson (Halldo´rsson, 1971: 229) and is first recorded in 1955, together O with the derivatives staðlaður (adjective) ‘standard, standardised’ and sto¨ðlun ‘standardisation’.4 Similarly, Icelandic tækni ‘technology, technique’ derives ex interno from Icelandic tæki ‘tool’ and is reproduced ex externo from Danish (or international) teknik ‘technology, technique’. This neologism was coined in 1912 by Dr. Bjo¨rn Bjarnarson from Viðfjo¨rður in the East of Iceland. It was little used before the 1940s, but has ever since become highly common, as a lexeme and as an element in new formations, such as raftækni lit. ‘electrical technics’, i.e. ‘electronics’, tæknilegur ‘technical’ and tæknir ‘technician’ (Halldo´rsson, 1987: 96; 1995a; Sapir, 2008). The latter formation follows an ancient strong masculine pattern of ir- stem, formations denoting agent.5 Figure 2.5 summarises these processes, adding a relevant Israeli one. Icelandic uppi ‘yuppie’ was reproduced ex interno from Icelandic upp ‘up’ and ex externo from English yuppie. This slang word can be reanalysed as upp ‘up’the inflectional suffix -i. As uppi ‘yuppie’ is a homonym, not a polyseme of uppi ‘up, upstairs’, it is regarded here as a new form. Icelandic veira ‘virus’ was reproduced ex interno from Icelandic feyra ‘mouldiness, mustiness; rottenness, decay’ and ex externo on the internationalism virus. It was coined by the Director General of public health Vilmundur Jo´nsson in 1955, who was conscious of both the phonemic and the semantic aspects of his creation. Besides the common

Globally Speaking

38

Icelandic International

Icelandic

tækni

technique technology technical e.g. Danish teknik

tæki ‘tool’

[ tajkni]

+

‘technology, technique’

-ni

Coined in 1912 by Dr Björn Bjarnarson from Viðfjörður in the East of Iceland

nominal suffix

cf. the secondary derivatives raftœkni, lit. ‘electrical technics’, i.e. ‘electronics’; tœknilegur ‘technical’ and tœknir ‘technician’

Arabic

Arabic

[ taqni]/[ tiqani]

√tqn ‘to master, improve, bring to perfection’

‘technical, technological’ Vernacular Arabic [ tiqani]/[ tiqni] cf. the Arabic morphemic adaptation of the internationalism [tak ni:k] – rather technique: than [taq ni:k]

Israeli

cf.

‘improved (m, sg)’; ‘perfection, thorough proficiency’; [ mutqan] ‘perfect, professionally done, strong, finished up, improved’ (often said about craft/art works); [tiqn] ‘skilful, clever’

(Biblical) Hebrew

√tkn tekhnión The suggested spelling for Technion (‘Israel’s MIT’) by Israel’s poet laureate Chaim Nachman Bialik (1873–1934) – as opposed to the mere tekhnión (the , originally loanword pharyngealized [t], is the default transcription for a foreign being used for foreign th – cf. matemátika ‘mathematics’) (

ultimately took over as the name)

‘regulate, measure, estimate, be adjusted to the standard’, a secondary root of √kwn ‘be firm, be set up, prepare’ Proposed as the ultimate etymology for the internationalism technical by Professor Nahum Slouschz in 1930 (cf. Zuckermann 2003: 154)

Figure 2.5 Phonosemantic matching of TECHNICAL in Icelandic, Arabic and Israeli

Icelandic: Phonosemantic Matching

39

phonemes /v/ and /r/, Vilmundur Jo´nsson was apparently aware of the possibility of alluding to the English diphthong [aj] in English virus by the diphthong ei [ej] in veira. Moreover, Icelandic has an internal phonological development of i
ei. Having coined the word, Jo´nsson learned that long i in Latin happens to correspond frequently to Icelandic ei. As if this wouldn’t be enough, the word veira itself, and some derivations, appears in Bjo¨rn Halldo´rsson’s Icelandic dictionary from the end of the 18th century, with reference to feyra (see above). The derivation veirulaus (lit. veira‘-less’) is defined as ‘honest, straightforward’, which, according to Jo´nsson, enhances veira in its new meaning. However, veira in its old meaning is not attested in other written sources (Jo´nsson, 1985). The PSM veira and the formation ex externo vı´rus coexist in Icelandic today. Whereas vı´rus was first attested in 1945, veira was first attested in 1955. Veira is also used to denote ‘virus’ in the computer domain. Partial PSM The type of formation discussed in this chapter varies in its level of phonetic matching. Partial PSM is such a formation, whose phonetic matching is limited to no more than one morpheme of the ex externo element. In extreme cases, their very definition as PSMs can be questioned. Consider Icelandic fja´rfesta lit. ‘to moneyfasten’, i.e. ‘to invest’ and the derivative fja´rfesting lit. ‘moneyfastening’, i.e. ‘investment’ that were introduced in Iceland in the 1940s, reportedly by Gylfi Þ. Gı´slason. They were reproduced ex interno from Icelandic fe´ ‘money (genitive)’ festa ‘fasten’ and ex externo partially from English invest (Knu´tsson, 1993: 110). They are considered partial PSMs, as the first morph was substituted into Icelandic fja´r ‘money’ and the second one was reproduced phonetically and semantically as -fest-. Note also the possible influence of Danish investering, in which -ing functions as a noun suffix. The element -fest- occurs as the second element in other verbal formations, such as krossfesta lit. ‘to cross-fasten’, i.e. ‘to crucify’, where it has a concrete meaning. In lo¨gfesta lit. ‘to law-fasten’, i.e. ‘to legalise’ and staðfesta lit. ‘to place-fasten’, i.e. ‘to confirm’ the element -fest- has an abstract meaning, just as in fja´rfesta and fja´rfesting (Knu´tsson, 1993: 110; Sapir, 2008). Icelandic pallborðsumræður, or shortly pallborð, ‘panel discussion’ was reproduced ex interno from Icelandic pallborð (in genitive) ‘place of honour’ umræða (in pluralis tantum) ‘discussion’ and ex externo

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from English panel discussions. Phonemically, only the first syllable in Icelandic is equivalent to the two first syllables in English, sharing the phonemes /p/, /a/ and /l/. As Halldo´rsson (1995b) writes, he coined it around 1976, as he was looking for a suitable native word for the English term.

Conclusions and Theoretical Implications As this chapter makes clear, PSM seems to be so camouflaged that coiners conscious of the ex externo aspect of the word, let alone naı¨ve native speakers, may identify it as native while for language purists it may be considered a ‘recognised’ neologism in the language. Whereas so-called popular etymology is often mocked and looked down upon due to lacking connection between the SL semantics and the TL semantics or to a sheer misunderstanding of the SL meaning, PSM is by many considered an elegant and likewise sophisticated method of word-formation, succeeding in combining sound and meaning of both SL and TL and in awakening associations at the minds of the TL speakers. However, as we can see from the PSMs analysed throughout this chapter, the distinction between cre´ation savante and cre´ation populaire is not so categorical as many cre´ations savantes are in fact ‘populaires’ and many cre´ations populaires are indeed ‘savantes’ (cf. Zuckermann, 2003a). What at least at first glance seems like ‘good’ ex interno reproduction is in many cases a bifurcated reproduction ex interno cum ex externo, where the ex externo element is sometimes camouflaged. This description is true of the standard written language. In other registers or genres, as within scientific and professional language in different domains or within the colloquial language, the ex externo share is probably even higher in Icelandic. This is probably true also in other languages. PSM, a source of lexical enrichment distinct from guestwords, foreignisms, loan words and calquing, has had a vast impact across many languages. PSM, which usually goes unnoticed by speakers (especially those of generations following the original coinage), has introduced a substantial number of new senses and lexemes in Chinese, Finnish, Icelandic, Japanese, Israeli Hebrew, Turkish, pidgins, creoles and other languages. In the case of Icelandic, PSM reinforces the view that Icelandic lexis has been covertly influenced by other Germanic languages such as English and Danish. The (polychronically analysed) examples presented in this chapter prove that PSM is an important method of Icelandic word-formation, resulting in a handful of Icelandic lexemes or suggestions for neologisms. Many of these suggested and lexicalised

Icelandic: Phonosemantic Matching

41

neologisms have been produced through conscious word-formation. This is remarkable, taking into account the fact that the majority of SL words do not have a parallel TL element which may coincide on phonetic and on semantic levels. Such a constraint does not usually apply to calquing, morphophonemic adaptation and mere neologisation. Discussing Turkish examples of PSM, Deny (1935: 246) claims that such neologisms are ‘without precedent in the annals of linguistics’. This chapter corrects that statement. As our data show, PSM is above all a means of disguising an ex externo lexical item by attaching ex interno elements that are both phonetically and semantically connected with the ex externo lexical item. This implies that even though the neologism consists of meanings and phonemes, which are at the same time ex interno and ex externo, the sense ex externo is primary to the sense ex interno. After all, the sense ex externo is the one introduced in the TL. With ko´rre´ttur ‘totally correct’ as an exception, all our data show that the sense ex externo is the final meaning of the new PSM. The ex interno sense is just used, if one can say so, ‘to justify it’. As for the phonemes, our data witness a broad range of phonetic affinity, from partial PSMs that are phonetically distant from the SL, such as fja´rfesta ‘to invest’, through phonetically somewhat related ratsja´ ‘radar’, to the phonetically very similar uppi ‘yuppie’. Looking further at the semantic aspect of PSM, it has the advantage for language planners that apparently, differently from many other formations ex externo, a wide spectrum of senses ex externo follows with the PSM. English lexemes such as chat and mail have been recently reproduced in numerous languages, but are usually semantically limited to such a degree that second language speakers of English might sometimes forget, or not even know, that the SL English chat can also mean ‘small talk’ or ‘to have a small talk’ and that just saying mail in English does not necessarily imply that it is electronic. However, in PSMs a broader semantic range ex externo is reproduced, similarly to calques. For instance, Icelandic sto¨ð does not only mean ‘station’ as a physical location, but also the establishment of a radio or television station. Icelandic tækni does not only mean ‘technique’ and ‘technology’ in the mechanical sense, but also when it comes to using any technique, as in sports. Likewise, Icelandic veira does not only mean ‘virus’ in the medical sense, but also a computer virus (just like in English).6 The abortive coinage bifra-bifrari introduces new forms. However, it is impossible to conclude from only two examples that it would be less

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likely for a coinage introducing a new form to be accepted by the speech community than for a coinage on a preexistent form. PSM reflects cultural and social interactions and often manifests the attempt of a culture to preserve its identity when confronted with an overpowering alien environment, without segregating itself from potential influences. The result can be contempt (cf. Zuckermann, 2005a) or ‘cultural flirting’ (being strongly influenced by the environment, as is the case of Icelandic, which is currently greatly influenced by English). PSM strengthens the idea that language is a major tool for cultures to maintain or form their identity. This chapter demonstrates the existence of concealed ex externo influences on Icelandic, mainly from English and Danish. Notes 1. Similarly, Swedish Pippi La˚ngstrump (cf. English Pippi Longstocking, the surname being a calque of the Swedish), the name of the protagonist of Astrid Lingren’s children’s stories, was phonetically matched in Israeli as bı´lbi lo´ khlum, lit. ‘Bilby Nothing’, as was done in many other languages (cf. Zuckermann, 2003a: 28). 2. Note that Old English go¯d-spel is itself a calque of Greek oyaggo´ lion euange´lion (
Latin euangelium) ‘gospel’, lit. ‘glad tidings, good news; reward of good tidings, given to the messenger’, from euˆ ‘good’ a´ngelos ‘messenger, envoy’. pffi Juxtapose Icelandic guðspjall with a˚won gilyo¯n/ ‘evil revelation-book’, a˚wo¯n gilyo¯n ‘sin revelation-book’, and /ob B Bon gilyo¯n/ ‘stone revelation-book’
PSMs, found in early, uncensored copies of the Hebrew Babylonian Talmud, Sabbath Tractate, 116a. Note the structural compromise in the expressions above. For example, the quasihyperbaton construct-state a˚won gilyo¯n/ literally means ‘evil of book’ rather than ‘book of evil’. Switching places between the nomen rectum and the nomen regens
resulting in *gilyon a˚won ‘book of evil’
would have been much better semantically but not nearly as good phonetically. A similar ‘poetic licence’ occurs in Maskilic Hebrew pe´’eyr a´mud (pronounced in Polish Ashkenazic Hebrew pe´ayr a´mid), lit. ‘glory of pillar’, an adaptation of European pyramid. *a´mud pe´’eyr, lit. ‘pillar of glory’, would have been much better semantically. 3. Note that Jerusalem artichoke, the species of sunflower (Helianthus tuberosus) which tastes rather like an artichoke, is a lay phonetic matching of Italian Girasole Articiocco ‘sunflower artichoke’. It is said to have been distributed under this Italian name from the Farnese garden at Rome soon after its introduction to Europe in 1617. 4. Interestingly, the early Germanic form of Latin standardum, probably from externdere ‘to stretch out’ -ard, was the Middle High German PSM stanthart, lit. ‘stand hard’. 5. The internationalism technical was phonosemantically matched in Arabic too, as /taqniy, tiqaniy/ ‘technical, technological’ and /taqniyya, tiqaniyya/ pffiffi ‘technology, technique’. These terms derive ex interno from Arabic / tqn

Icelandic: Phonosemantic Matching

43

‘to master, improve, bring to perfection’ as in /’atqana/ ‘he did something perfectly’ (Blau, 1981: 171
172). In fact, the Arabic morphemic adaptation of International technique is Arabic /takni:k/ rather than /taqni:k/, and cf. /takno:lo:g˘i/ ‘technological’ (cf. Zuckermann, 2003a: 70
72). 6. In such cases the semantic process involves metaphorisation (J.R.
the editor’s note).

Chapter 3

French: Tradition versus Innovation as Reflected in English Borrowings MIRIAM BEN-RAFAEL

The dynamics of language contact and its effect on languages is well known and globalisation today is probably responsible for most language contacts, as it speeds up the diffusion of English throughout the world, brings it into intense contact with numerous other languages, and enhances the influence of English on them (Crystal, 2003a; Go¨rlach, 2001, 2002b; Maurais & Morris, 2004). For years this phenomenon has been fuelling ongoing debates among linguists in France about its significance for the development of French. It is in this context that this chapter analyses the influence of English on the French language in France, focusing particularly on its affect on the lexicon.1 For centuries numerous foreign words have entered the French lexicon as the result of diverse economic, cultural and political influences. This is particularly true regarding English, which has been exerting a strong influence on French since the 16th century, as expressed in the adoption of a broad variety of anglicisms. In the 20th century, much more than in any earlier period, this influence gained tremendously in power in the context of globalisation and the forceful role of American English in international communication (Hage`ge, 1987; Ho¨fler, 1982; Humbley, 2002; Pergnier, 1989; Truchot, 1990; Walter, 1997). Anglicisation became striking in the 1960s and was then vehemently criticised by linguists as a threat to the very survival of French. Etiemble voiced this criticism in his famous book Parlez-vous franglais (1964), which has been reprinted many times over the years. Up to now, about 40 years after the first publication, and a few years after the author’s death (2002), the question of the longterm effect of Anglicisation of French has remained open. In general terms, the influence of English on French is expressed in a wide range of linguistic phenomena, including borrowings, calques, lexical and grammatical interferences, and neologisms. All these have been defined, though in different ways, as anglicisms or americanisms 44

English Borrowings in French

45

(Hage`ge, 1987; Pergnier, 1989; Picone, 1996: 1
7). It is on English borrowings in French that we choose to focus in the following.2 Lexical borrowings have been the subject of numerous studies over the past several decades (Clyne, 1986; Field, 2002; Grosjean, 1982; Jacobson, 1998, 2001; Mackey, 1976; Myers-Scotton, 2002; Poplack & Sankoff, 1984; Poplack et al., 1988). It has been shown that they primarily involve nouns (Romaine, 1989) and, more specifically, concern cultural items (Mackey, 1976; Romaine, 1989)
though it is almost impossible to forecast which lexical elements will be adopted. A distinction is often drawn between collective and personal borrowings (Poplack et al., 1988), between loan-blends and loan-shifts, or between borrowings which do not assimilate to the phonology of the host language, and others which get partially or entirely assimilated. Some lexical borrowings are due to L1 attrition (Ben-Rafael, 2004a; Dorian, 1981, 1989; Schmid, 2002; Schmid et al., 2004). They may also increase the array of linguistic choices at the speaker’s disposal, where they are not due to a lack of appropriate terms in L1. It is in this perspective that Haugen (1953) contends that borrowings can be classified as those which fulfil a lexical gap and those which are gratuitous and carry specific semantic features. Moreover, many researchers (Auer, 1984, 1995, 1996; Lu¨di, 1990; MyersScotton, 1993) view borrowings as a new discursive means which is available to the speaker and which can also convey self-identity. Regarding English loan words in French, more specifically, Pergnier (1989) suggests they fulfil three essential functions: (1) designing a new reality which can hardly be named by French terms; (2) indicating a virtual reservoir for neologisms to invigorate the vocabulary with new denotative and connotative values; and (3) adding a ‘quasi magic’ touch to the discourse. Pergnier believes that the phenomenon of franglais described and condemned by Etiemble (1964) extends far beyond the notion of fashion. According to him, it is a natural process of Anglicisation, accounted for by specific facts carrying systematic consequences. The most easily identifiable of anglicisms, Pergnier says, are borrowings which generate new signifiers under innovative phonetic forms in spoken language and graphic ones in the written language, introducing thereby new signifieds into the target language. More specifically, in the case of English borrowings in French, there is not always a direct and complete overlapping between the signified and the signifier. The borrowing’s signified is then merely a hybrid product, a meeting point, a junction of two semiological systems. Moreover, borrowed words often undergo adaptation in terms of their morphosyntax as well as their semantics and phonetics. From the

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semantic point of view, the meanings of borrowed terms are frequently simplified, with their meanings becoming restricted to only one element of their original content. By virtue of its transfer from one lexical system to another, the borrowed word often loses meanings to become a ‘pure tool of designation’ (Pergnier, 1989: 57). The borrowed term exits the English system through the reduction of its meanings in order to enter the borrowing language. The borrowing is then restructured as it undergoes a process of integration in its new linguistic system. This process is not a passive integration of a new term that has come to replace older ones. It is the cause of new semantic differentiations, and redefinitions and reconfiguration of semantic areas made of existing words in a way that permits adoption of the newcomer (Pergnier, 1989: 62). In this sense, borrowings renew the lexicon and instil new life into contemporary vocabulary with new nuances and connotations. Anglicisation of French which takes on multiple forms, may fulfil a variety of functions. In the language of the young, for instance, borrowings are used more for their emblematic significance than for their semantic value; for scientists, they respond more to a communicative necessity than to a question of taste. On the other hand, Franglais is not a homogeneous phenomenon and it unevenly affects different social strata and areas of linguistic activity. The linguistic behaviours of Franglais users also vary according to factors such as age or profession. Accordingly, it is often difficult to distinguish which uses pertain to pragmatics and which to language game or mystical purposes. Some borrowings would convey particular nuances which cannot be found in French equivalents (wagons versus chariots, or outlaws versus hors-la-loi). Hence, borrowings do not exclude the use of French terms and their utilisation but add a touch of picturesque to describe specific situations. Echoing the general propositions offered by studies in the area of borrowings (see above), numerous classifications of English borrowings in French have been proposed (Actes du colloque sur les anglicismes, 1994: 208
210; Mareschal, 1994: 26
32). Distinctions have been drawn between English terms introduced into French ‘as is’ or slightly transformed, and others that are more substantially altered. As a rule, the latter are condemned by ‘purists’ as orthographic, typographic, morphological, syntactic or semantic ‘English
American contaminations’ (Boly, 1979: 10, 11). Ho¨fler (1982) distinguishes between (1) lexical import which may consist of whole English terms, borrowings that combine English and French words, and false anglicisms; (2) ‘migratory’ words borrowed from other languages via English; (3) lexical substitutions, i.e. semantic borrowings or calques. Picone (1996: 4
7) differentiates seven categories

English Borrowings in French

47

of borrowings: (1) integral (scanner, week-end), (2) semantic (adopter un profil bas, cf. to keep a low profile), (3) structural or calque
an English imitation by French, (4) pseudo-anglicisms or neologisms of French making, but composed of English elements which mimic integral borrowings (new look), (5) hybrid-neologisms combining English and French, Latin or Greek, (6) graphic borrowings when anglicised orthography replicates or overlaps the French writing system, and (7) phonological borrowings when English phonemes are introduced into French. Walter (2000: 54) distinguishes between (1) English words with little change in form and meaning, (2) new derivations, (3) -ing suffixed terms, (4) words with new meanings, (5) translations, (6) calques, (7) pseudo anglicisms and (8) particular cases. As for Humbley (2002: 120
123), he differentiates between (1) direct loans, (2) replacements of loans by various forms of translation and (3) pseudo-loans. The latter may be innovations using English elements without any English model (tennisman, racingman), truncated loans (camping, dancing, lifting instead of ‘camping area’, ‘dance hall’, facelift) or semantic extensions where anglicisms are used with a meaning not attested in English (footing in the sense of ‘jogging’). The diverse categories proposed here and many others do not, actually, exhaust all possibilities of borrowings in French, and classifications remain often vague and confused (Mareschal, 1994: 32; Picone, 1996: 7; Walter, 2000: 54). Furthermore, the reasons evoked to explain the scope and forms of the penetration of English into French as well as the attitudes and value judgements of linguists toward this phenomenon are highly varied and even contradictory. Substantial change, actually, has taken place over the years and we may delineate a general line of development. It is to this issue that we now turn.

French Linguists’ Approaches to Anglicisation We may divide, grosso modo, the development of this debate into two phases: from 1960s to the mid-1990s and since the late 1990s. As mentioned, in the 1960s Anglicisation was harshly criticised. Etiemble (1964) even spoke of the destructive invasion of ‘franglais’ and the formation of a ‘sabir atlantic’, i.e. an Atlantic sabir,3 which threatened to take the place of French. Etiemble’s protest sparked a storm of reactions
mainly supportive at the time. Following Etiemble, linguists have divided into two major camps
those who more or less maintain his position and those who somehow reject it. For the former, the principal

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contention involves identity (Boly, 1979; Deniau, 1983; Doppagne, 1979; Lenoble-Pinson, 1991; Voirol, 1990). They contend that it is not by tolerating Franglais or a defective language that we will be able to keep to our francophone identity (Deniau, 1983), and that ‘words do not only designate objects or feelings, they express a certain perception of the world and of others, as well as a perception of life’ (Lenoble-Pinson, 1991: 7, 8). The aspiration to remain faithful to French against Franglais is primarily bound to the awareness that borrowings are primarily feared as a source of linguistic impoverishment. Franglais is perceived as franglomanie stemming from indifference, laziness, ignorance or snobbery (Doppagne, 1979: 55
58). Until the 1980s and 1990s, Anglicisms continued to be widely seen as a force to be combated (Lederer, 1988). One spoke of ‘insidious Anglicisms’ and ‘Anglomania’ (Voirol, 1990). Even researchers who considered borrowings as French words as long as they behaved according to the rules of French grammar still vigorously opposed what they called ‘awkward forms’
shampooing, shampooiner, shampooineur (Rey-Debove & Gagnon, 1988). Others produced lists of current borrowings, in order to propagate the use of French substitutes including, e.g. pigiste for free-lance; info-varie´te´s for talk-show; sauci-pain/ hot-dog; tomatine/ketchup (Lenoble-Pinson, 1991); or mercatique for marketing; pittonage/zapping; perdeur/loser (Voirol, 1990). These innovators declared that ‘looking for equivalents [to EnglishAmerican borrowings] does not mean Anglophobia or Americanophobia. It denotes less a resistance to Anglomania than an assertion of a will of francophones to express themselves in their own language’ (LenoblePinson, 1991: 7, 8). But other researchers, even when they do not deny that the identity-culture issue remains bound to the preservation of a ‘pure and uncontaminated’ language, understand that specific conditions and contexts must be taken into consideration when judging the appropriateness of borrowings, such as the challenges of bilingualism and the fact that English has become a quasi-universal language (Hage`ge, 1987). Today English fulfils major transglossic functions for Francophones, just as it does for speakers of other languages in contemporary societies (Truchot, 1990). Trescases (1982) also believes that people today are ready to look at Franglais in a new manner despite the tensions that may set America and Europe in opposition. In the meantime, both in public speech and in the media, the growth of Franglais has by no means been interrupted by the debates dividing the linguists. In the late 1990s Franglais continues its course and in the words of Lenoble-Pinson (1994) ‘se porte bien’ (feels well), even if from

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49

time to time one still finds vituperative articles against its propagation in Etiemble’s tradition and attempts to fight the English influence by practical policies (Le Cornec, 1982).4 ‘French public opinion’, Pergnier (1994) reports, ‘stands somewhat passively this state of affairs which fails to enlist the crowd’. Radical changes are observed as the last century moves to its close. For Da Costa (1999), for instance, borrowings are just transpositions of words from one language to another. Words, he says, do not recognise national boundaries. Words stemming from specific languages enrich others with new nuances. Franglais is by no means threatening; it is an aspect of the linguistic transnational reality of our contemporary world. The major contribution to this shift of attitude to the penetration of English into French was Walter’s (2001) book Honni soit qui mal y pense (Evil Be To Him Who Evil Thinks), in which she contended that Francophones must stop worrying obsessively about the ‘me´chant loup’, that is, Anglicisms. French is no longer the international language it used to be . . . which does not mean that French does not feel well. On the contrary, French is fully able to express the modern world with words it borrows from English and the words that it generates by itself . . . If French did not borrow English words, it would be worrying. It would be a sign of fossilisation. (Walter, 2001: 245) Over the last two centuries, Walter elaborates, French has been enriched by a large number of terms of English origin, while English, in the same manner, has never stopped borrowing from French since the Middle Ages. However, English has been far more welcoming than French to borrowings from its counterpart. This is also the conclusion of several English scholars (Wright, 2000) who see the purist and elitist attitudes of the champions of French as the continuation of a long French tradition (Dewaele, 2000) backed by republican values in which France wishes to illustrate Frenchness itself (Ager, 2000). Humbley (2002) thinks that French attitudes to anglicisms as well as the official policy of their replacement are somewhat unique in postwar Europe. Among the factors suggested to explain this kind of policy, he underscores three essential facts: (1) language planning is part of French history; (2) French was the leading international language until the 19th century, and is still an international linguistic factor; and (3) giving French substitutes to English terms and developing a terminology planning are considered as important ‘means of catching up in the race against English’.

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Globally Speaking

That said, a substantial gap still exists between, on the one hand, the normative attitude of the French Academy and other bodies charged with the mission of preserving a ‘bon franc¸ais’ and, on the other, attitudes of speakers in general who show more openness to foreign languages, and to English in particular (Judge, 2000). Among the French institutions engaged in the safeguarding of the language, the French Academy has the task of granting legitimacy of words and forms of speech; the De´le´gation Ge´ne´rale a` la Langue Franc¸aise and a commission for terminology related to various ministries are in charge of institutionalising specific terminology, responding to neological needs.5 Moreover, anti-anglicism groups of activists still exist. They may be organised in associations, express themselves in publications, use mailing lists and issue press releases.6 As for the locutors themselves, Pergnier (1994) claims that it is difficult to ascertain what their opinions toward anglicisms are, given the fact that surveys are not numerous in this area. What is known is that reactions vary from one group to another
some are more fundamentally hostile to anglicisms and others much more flexible and welcoming. The largest majority, it seems to Pergnier, stands somewhere in the middle. An analysis of letters by readers sent to Le Monde between 1987 and 1997 shows (Walker, 1998: 79), ‘a lack of linguistic security that is sometimes implicit and sometimes more than explicit’. Walker’s (1998: 505
508) study in different francophone communities leads him to the conclusion that French students are more indifferent to the multiplication of English borrowings than other groups of Francophones,7 and that the same is true of their indifference toward the notifications of the French Academy and other regulating institutions. Similar conclusions were reached by Fugger (1979; cited by Walker, 1998) in a research that tackled the same topics.

The Research: Objectives and Methodology It is in this context that we present our own research on the present state of the Anglicisation of French of France. As this process is vast and complex, we look here only at borrowings. Our first intention is to draw out a general picture of this penetration of English borrowings updated to 2004. The second objective of this research is then to consider, on the basis of this picture, how far, about 40 years after the publication of Etiemble’s manifest, his pessimistic forecast
as well as that of numerous other researchers about the future of French
is confirmed

English Borrowings in French

51

by reality. Is the penetration of English that serious a threat to the very existence of French? Guided by these research interests, we collected data over three years (2001
2004) from (a) television programmes on the French channels France 2, TV5 and Arte (news, shows, documentaries, films); (b) French newspapers on the Internet (Le Monde, Libe´ration, France-soir, Le Figaro) and in print (Le Monde, Match); (c) conversations, random collection of utterances gathered from French speakers living in France; (d) 15 informants were interviewed and asked to supply lists of English words used currently, according to them, by French people in their regular discourse; (e) lists of English borrowings recognised by current dictionaries (Ho¨fler, 1982; Rey-Debove & Gagnon, 1988; Robert, 1995, 2001). Within the limited scope of this study, we do not take into account the innumerable English terms related to advertising and the current linguistic landscape in France.

The Findings Categories of findings The borrowings in our collection represent various grammatical categories
nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs
and pertain to various semantic fields. They include both borrowings that do not have equivalent terms in French and others that do. Some have undergone semantic shifts, while others have formed the basis for neologisms; some are loan-blends, while others are pseudo-English terms. This classification is to be considered with caution since, as Mareschal (1994) and others have emphasised, the boundaries between the various types of borrowings are often fluid and changeable, and thus difficult to pin down. Lack of equivalence

Among the borrowings without French equivalents some are adopted en bloc, phonetically and semantically: black out, box, brunch, clip, leadership, attachment; others only semantically: superman, wagon, management.8 These borrowings are explained essentially by the need to name new technological activities, such as in computer science; the want of appropriate French terms to describe given cultural values; or the reference to new concepts appearing under new names (pressing, email, start up, web), which, however, may eventually be re-baptised in French (Courriel for email; jeune pousse for start up; or toile for web).

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Globally Speaking

Borrowings and French equivalents

Borrowings may appear even when French equivalents exist. They are in fact numerous and often present semantic differences when compared to their so-called French equivalents, as we see in the following examples: (1) Test/e´preuve; speed/vitesse; show/spectacle; match/compe´tition sportive; boss/patron; smiling/sourire; krach/faillite bancaire; cool/calme; relax/ de´tendu; job/boulot; interview/entretien; week end/fin de semaine; wc/ toilettes; lifting/de´ridage; peeling/exfoliation; self-service/libre service; (faire du) shopping/courses; walkman/baladeur; fast food/restauration rapide; (avoir le) feeling/impression; standing/haut niveau; staff/e´quipe; star/e´toile, vedette. At times, borrowings adopt meanings that distance them completely from their French translations. This is also the case of cow-boy versus vacher, leader versus dirigeant or meeting versus re´union, for example. In the 2002 French presidential campaign, the various French political leaders (not ‘dirigeants’) Chirac, Jospin and Le Pen, for instance, held political meetings, but never ‘re´unions’. The same happened during the Bush and Kerry campaign in 2004
they were always presented as leaders in the French press and television shows. Lucky Luke, the hero of the French/ Belgian comics is a cow-boy (and not a ‘vacher’), because in French only the English word expresses the content of this cultural concept9 (BenRafael, 2004b). Semantic simplification

Borrowings are often simplified and reduced when introduced in French, keeping but one of their original ‘signifie´s’ of the English ‘signifiant’; une star means only an actor or actress; un short refers only to short trousers; une lady is a woman who behaves in a distinguished manner; un drink is an alcoholic drink; un boy is a young servant (domestique), des girls are dancers in a music hall or a night club des danseuses de music hall; un/e black is a dark skinned person (une personne de peau noire). Semantic amplification and recovery

Later on, once adopted in French, the meaning of the English term can expand and acquire new meanings in addition to the one originally imported from English. This amplification, however, is less frequent than the reduction process of the signifie´s. On the other hand, what is relatively frequent is the recovery and addition of signifie´s that had not been considered or had been rejected at the first stage of adoption of the

English Borrowings in French

53

English signifiant; cool, for instance, which was originally used in French as jazz cool versus jazz hot, has taken over time various semantic variants of the English term and has become synonymous with formidable, bien, joli etc., as these examples show: (2) Ma grand-me`re est cool (‘my grandmother is wonderful’) (3) Speaker 1: Apre`s on ira au cine´ (‘later we will go to the movie’) Speaker 2: Cool (‘wow’) And a writer talking about her readers says: (4) J’avais des lecteurs qui pouvaient eˆtre cool (gentils) ( . . . .) enfin un peu de douceur (Paris Match, 8/04) (‘I had readers who were cool . . . at last some gentleness’) Similarly, black, which basically signifies a black person, has also started taking on the French meaning of ‘black market’; (5) Il l’a eu au black (France 2, 9/04) (‘he got it on the black market’) Semantic alteration and specialisation

The English signifier may also lose its original meaning and receive a new one; the signifier remains more or less bound to the semantic field it belongs to in English, though it experiences a sort of bifurcation, causing the new signified to differ from the original one, as in (6): (6) cake: Fr: fruit cake versus Eng: any cake Foot: Fr: football versus Eng: foot Square: Fr: small public garden versus Eng: square/quadrilateral place (e.g. Trafalgar Square) Poster: Fr: decorative poster versus Eng: advertisement poster Neologisms

Lexical productivity is also made possible by lexical derivations of adopted English words by means of affixes; derived from borrowings, new terms are created
nouns, adjectives, as well as verbs, which seem to be the most productive forms: (7) stock0verb: stocker; abstract nounsuffix: stockage, agent noun suffix: stockiste; prefixnoun: surstockage (8) stopper, scotcher, bluffer, (se)crasher, mixer, spidder, (se)dopper, chatter, looker, relooker, briefer, de´brifer A journalist reports in Le Monde after the catastrophe of the Twin Towers (11/2001):

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Globally Speaking

´ s a` leur te´le´visions (for: colle´s)/‘people are Les gens sont scotche glued (like scotch tapes) to their TVs.’ ´ (for: s’est e´crase´)/‘the plane crashed’ (10) L’avion s’est crashe (9)

Franc¸oise, speaking about her family, writes in her e-mail: (11) Mon fils et sa julie squattent chez moi/’my son and his girlfriend squat by me (at home)’ On French television (France 2) we found: (12) Le jeu e´tait sponsorise´ par une banque/‘the game was sponsored by a bank’ (13) Il faut pas mixer les ide´es/‘one mustn’t mix ideas’ (14) G.: Allez speed un peu!
F.: Je suis stresse´e / G.: ‘Go with a little more speed!
F.: I’m stressed’. (France 2, 2003, Program: Un gars, une Fille) Pseudo-English terms

In a similar vein, there is a tendency to form English-looking terms which do not exist in English and are, in fact, false Anglicisms: (15) auto-stop for hitchhiking; tennisman for tennis player; footing for jogging; hair-coif for hairstyle; camping-car for motorhome; brushing for se´chage and brossage. Abbreviations

Alongside the adoption of English terms, we must also consider English abbreviations like VIP, USA, FBI and PC, and acronyms such as SONAR, RADAR and IBM, pronounced sometimes the English way and sometimes ‘a` la franc¸aise’
IBM (ibe´e`m), TV (te´ve´), ICBEM (ice´be´e`m). The formation of abbreviations and acronyms, typical of English, has been widely adopted by contemporary French, although the majority of abbreviations and acronyms remain shortenings of French terms pronounced the French way: HLM (from ‘habitations a` loyers mode´re´s/ ‘public sector of housing’), PC (parti communiste/‘communist party’), TGV (train a` grande vitesse/‘high-speed train’), SIDA (versus AIDS), SRAS (versus SARS), OTAN (versus NATO). Segmental English insertions

Together with unitary lexical borrowings, we find English insertions with more than one lexical element. These are idioms, full sentences and commercials which are very common in the press (16), in oral and written discourse (17) and in the general surrounding landscape.10

English Borrowings in French

55

(16) just do it; fashion victims; directeur du unit business chaussures; made IBM (17) my pleasure; everything under control; up to you; no comment; help yourself English expressions come up in French e-mails
isn’t?; thank you d’avance
or call attention to the written message: (18) On pourra converser ou comme les gens ‘in’ disent ‘chatter’ sur E-mail; y a plus qu’a` correspondre et a` ‘chatter’ ‘we will be able to converse or, as ‘in’ people say, to ‘chat’ on Email; we just have to correspond with each other and ‘chat’’ Borrowings also often lend themselves to word games, as in the following example when Margo intentionally uses the French verb ramer (to row) in her e-mail together with the English verb surf, in order to express her poor web surfing skills: (19) Moi je rame pe´niblement sur le web, certains surfent, ce n’est pas mon cas ‘Me, I row with difficulty on the web, some people surf (easily), that’s not the case with me’ Borrowings as discursive means

Besides lexical aspects, borrowings may fulfil specific discursive functions: the repetition or the recall of a French word by means of an English equivalent, for example, emphasises or makes the sense of an occurrence more explicit. In (20) an instructor explains to future receptionists/telephonists the importance of smiling at clients, even when talking to invisible listeners: (20) Il faut faire passer le sourire, le smiling . . . il faut que tu fasses un smiling ‘One must let the listener feel the smile, the smiling . . . you have to make a smile’ Similarly, the shift from one language to the other enhances the discourse (21, 22), and allows indirect discourse to be resumed or reported (23): (21) Je suis reste´ dans le purple, instead of: Je reste dans la gamme des violets ‘I dress in all sorts of purple’ (22) C’est quelqu’un qui est tre`s foot . . . moi je suis pas tre`s foot ‘It’s somebody very fond of football . . . Me, I’m not fond of football’

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Globally Speaking

(23) L’enterrement de la reine me`re ’the queen mum‘ comme les anglais l’appellent aura lieu mercredi ‘The funeral of the queen mother, ‘the queen mum’, as the English call her, will take place next Wednesday’ The transition from French to English may also facilitate the differentiation of concepts; PC, when pronounced the English way means a personal computer, whereas PC pronounced the French way
pe´ce´
means the French Communist Party. Similarly, the distinction between round versus tour (24),11 or start-up and jeune pousse (25), evokes the pugnacious nature of the presidential campaign, as well as the difference in nuance between some German start-ups that are rather more experienced than some young French ones. (24) Premier round avant le deuxie`me tour des pre´sidentielles ‘First round before the second presidential round’ (25) Des start up allemands a` l’aide des jeunes pousses franc¸aises ‘German start-ups help French start-ups’ Borrowings and semantic fields According to the literature, borrowings firstly concern cultural domains; yet as already mentioned, it is practically impossible to predict which terms will be borrowed, and at times it is difficult to connect them with a specific domain. When we attempt to classify our data, we see that some semantic domains are particularly privileged in this respect, such as sports, politics, economics, computer science, fashion and music. This is shown here with examples from the sports domain collected in 2002 at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics (26) and the French presidential campaign (27): (26) il a touche´ au milieu du snowboard/‘he touched the middle of the snowboard’; des e´quipes de hockey sur glace/‘ice-hockey teams’; le hockeyeur/‘the hockey player’; 10 km de sprint/‘a 10-km sprint’; last lap, finish, shooting; le coaching peut faire gagner une rencontre/‘coaching can help win a match’ (27) suspense dans une ambiance de meeting/‘suspense in a meeting atmosphere’; paraıˆtre sur les me´dias vaut mieux que vingt meetings/‘exposure in the media is worth more than twenty meetings’ Some borrowings, however, remain without any affiliation, while still others seem to share structures which ensure easy integration into French. As already noted by Hage`ge (1987), Pergnier (1989) and others, one finds

English Borrowings in French

57

a tendency to adopt monosyllabic terms (cool, coach, hot, kit, tag) and bisyllabic ones (sponsor, roller, tuner, charter). When borrowings are longer words, truncation may take place, self-service becoming self and livingroom becoming living. -ing terms are frequently borrowed; prefixes (mini, self, super, extra, hyper, top) and suffixes (man, ex), which are basic in the formation of neologisms, are frequently used as units on their own (28): (28) c’est un type super/‘he’s a super guy’; C’e´tait extra/‘it was great’; la mode mini et maxi/‘the mini- and maxi-fashion’ Moreover, English blendings such as brunch (br/eakfastl/unch) are numerous in French and inspire French neologisms
courriel, progiciel, coming as substitutes for e-mail and software and composed by the blending of courri/er el/ectronique, and pro/gramme lo/giciel. The French borrowing process: An unflagged and creeping phenomenon English borrowings penetrate French most naturally. Discourse, both written and oral, remains fluid even though anglicisms are sometimes flagged. Flagging may be signalled by inverted commas in the writing: (29) c’est ’so british‘ (‘it’s so British’); ‘it’s not my cup of tea’ (Le Monde, 2002) (30) ils e´taient ’cast members‘ pour reprendre la terminologie impose´e (Le Figaro, January 2004) ‘they were ‘cast members’, to use the imposed terminology’ The user may also apologise for their use: Hage`ge (1987) quotes, for example, President Mitterand who, after having said the English word ‘remake’, immediately added remake . . . si je peux me permettre de parler franglais ‘if I am allowed to speak Franglais’. In fact, generally speaking, one can say that a kind of ‘tacit Anglicist agreement’ penetrates the discourse: borrowings drag in other ones or provoke word games; the use of ‘start-up’ in an article in Le Monde/Internet about current economic conceptions and the proble´matique of the start-up system brings out, for instance, the ironic use of ‘start down’: (31) start up ou start down, que nous re´serve l’avenir? ‘Start up or start down, what does future have in stock for us?’ English citations, without any translation, appear rather frequently in the press. After 11 September 2001, a French reporter writes in Le Monde (28.11.01):

Globally Speaking

58

(32) united we stand dit un slogan affiche´ partout a` New-York ‘United we stand says a slogan all over New York’ The knowledge, or at least the familiarity, of the French TV viewers with British/American codes is taken for granted. During the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics (in 2002), for example, the American display of the results on French TV was presented in mostly English, as in the USA. Also, last lap, finish, shooting, etc., were said. The same happened during the Athens Olympic Games in summer 2004. This of course does not prevent French TV from remaining faithful to conventional French codes in other circumstances. The football match between France and Wales in Cardiff (2002) was presented with French conventions, including the translation of Wales by Galles throughout. The proliferation of English terms is recognised and ‘coolly’ experienced by French interlocutors. Still, when our 15 francophone informants from France were asked to provide a list of English words in use in contemporary French, at first some of them found it difficult to answer, even denying the use of any English term. One of them, the most ‘purist’, only agreed to speak after hearing others recalling English words, and told of his son wanting to buy baggies (not pantalons), and spending most of his time on the web (not on the toile). Hence, when the informants began to think it over, borrowings of all kinds literally streamed out (Figure 3.1). baskets

car jacking

duffle-coat

internet

night club

scotch

back up

casting

e-mail

interview

no comment

scrabble

stress

baggy

charter

fair play

jackpot

on line

(se) shooter

struggle for life

basket

chatter

fashion

joint

out

self control

super

battle-dress

clash

fashion victim

kidnapping

panel

shift

surfer

starter

best seller

clean

feed back

kipper

penalty

shop

tea room

black

cocktail

flashback

kit

pin up

slash

timing

book

come back

football

leader

play boy

speaker

top

boots

compact disk

forwarder

look

pressing

spleen

training

boss

computer

gang

media

rap

spot

trip

break

cool

gangster

mail

relooker

squash

tuning

briefing

cornflakes

grill

mailer

review

squat

volley ball

brunch

crasher

happy end

meeting

ring

standing-

walkman

brushing

dealer

hip hop

miss

rock

innovation

web

bug

derby

home jacking

net

round

star

week-end

business

drink

in

news

rush hour

start up

zapping

Figure 3.1 Francophone borrowings
a sample out of 360 occurrences

English Borrowings in French

59

Some might have thought that the war in Iraq, particularly at the beginning (Spring 2003), having somewhat strained French relations with the USA and Great Britain, might have an impact on the use of English in French. However, despite occasional biting criticism or puns that appeared in the press and a sort of war of words,12 the anglicist flow has, in fact, continued at the same rate. To present the news about the war itself, it is American terminology that is used
holster, scotch, body-bags, MRE (meals ready to eat); in Le Monde on 2 March 2003, for example, it said: (33) Un sergent-major se pre´parant a` entrer en Irak a e´poussete´ son holster de cuir noir ‘A sergeant-major preparing to go into Iraq dusted down his black leather holster’ (34) On s’inquie`te pour savoir si les 40 body bags au lieu des 200 demande´s seraient suffisants ‘One is worried whether the 40 body bags instead of the 200 requested will be sufficient’ Reports of speech or quotations generally remain in English, untranslated: (35) Finalement . . . Bush se le`ve et annonce: ‘ok, let’s go’ ‘Finally . . . Bush gets up and announces: ‘ok, let’s go’’ (36) Les gamins crient ‘water water’ a` la vue de tout ve´hicule e´tranger ‘The children shout ‘water, water’, any time they see a foreign vehicle’ And events are described using the usual English terms: jogging, slogans, look, supporter, raid, back home, stock and others: (37) Les soldats ame´ricains font du jogging chaque matin ‘The American soldiers go jogging every morning’ (38) Un journaliste britannique a demande´ d’eˆtre ‘imbedded’, ‘inte´gre´’13 a` une troupe ‘A British journalist asked to be ‘imbedded’, ‘integrated’ in a unit’ (39) En une journe´e des milliers de raids/‘In one day thousand of raids’ Demonstrators against the war in Iraq are also described in English terms: (40) La jeunesse japonaise . . . allure cool se joint aux manifestants de Stop the war! (they have written) ‘no war’ sur la chausse´e . . . le temps des coctails Molotov est re´volu. ‘The Japanese youth . . . very cool joins the demonstrators of Stop

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the war! (they have written) ‘no war’ on the pavement . . . Molotov cocktail time is over’ The same is true of daily life in Baghdad (Le Monde/Internet, 18.9.03): (41) Trois filles (. . .) designers dans une imprimerie de Bagdad racontent leur peur ‘Three girls (. . .) designers in a printing firm in Baghdad talk about their fear’ A journalist reports14 what an Iraqi dealer in radio and television sets has to say: (42) Le business marche bien, les gens veulent entendre les nouvelles du monde, vous comprenez ‘Business is OK, people want to hear world news, you understand’ Thus the Iraqi conflict has not had an impact on anglicist habits in French. The case of the French rock singer Johnny Halliday, among many other examples, is good evidence of how alive and well English is in French. On the occasion of his 60th birthday, in the summer of 2003, all the articles in Le Monde, Le Figaro, Match or the Halliday website, were saturated with borrowings: (43) Happy birthday Mister Rockn’ Roll; le rocker est plein d’e´nergie; rue´e des fans; Johnny superstar shoote´ par 60 photographes; Johnny ge`re bien le stress; il jouera un crooner; il est en teˆte du hitparade; country, folk, blues, rock, disco, toutes les musiques qu’ il aime. (Match, 11 June 2003) ‘Happy birthday Mister Rockn’ Roll; the rocker is full of energy; a rush by the fans; Johnny a superstar is taken by 60 photographers; Johnny handles stress well; he will play a crooner; he’s at the top of the hit-parade; country, folk, blues, rock, disco, all the music he likes.’ (44) Il peut parodier les crooners, nasiller country/‘He can take off crooners, and the twang of country’; ses yeux bleus husky/‘his husky blue eyes’ (Le Figaro, 5 June 2003). The many examples available during this period indicate that Franglais continues apace, whether it is about the 2003 summer vacations (un petit break, mobile home, camping, barbecues, parking, beach party, candle-lights, tossing, fast-food) or children’s fashions for the new school year (baggy, bombers, matie`res stone´es, jersey gratte´, denim blanchi, bottes zippe´es, fashion, glamour, top).

English Borrowings in French

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Computer and Email, despite their new French equivalents, are still very much alive. Several days prior to the American presidential elections the following was written in Le Monde/Internet: (45) Toute l’actualite´ des e´lections ame´ricaines par E-mail/‘All the news about the American elections by E-mail’ Finally, on TV, the newscaster, when discussing the problems of succession after Arafat’s hospitalisation in France in October 2004, mentions the possibility alongside Abu Alaa and Abu Mazen of a third ‘leader’, an ‘outsider’ living outside the Palestinian territories (TV5, 29.9.04). Similarly, under the English title ‘France feelings’, an announcer presents a chocolate-fashion exhibition (France 2, 30.9.04). It would be ‘tedious’, as Hage`ge (1987) himself said, and practically impossible to monitor and pick out all the possible English/French combinations. They are creeping up endlessly. As already mentioned, borrowings adapt very well to written and spoken discourse that remains mostly fluid. This smooth lexical adaptation is supported by grammatical adjustment. We can even speak of a grammar of borrowings which is flexible and allows for variations. The grammar of borrowings Gender of nouns

While in English gender is often not morphologically marked, French distinguishes between masculine (m) and feminine (f) nouns, adjectives and certain verb forms. What gender should a borrowing from English have? It is difficult to formulate an absolute rule, but we can suggest that borrowings tend to adopt the gender of the French nouns that are the equivalents of the borrowings. This would be the case, for example in: une start up f, as in une entreprise or une jeune pousse; une star f as in une e´toile. Other examples, however, do not meet this principle: un meeting is m, whereas une re´union is f; une interview is f in the French spoken in France, yet un entretien is m. At times, the choice may appear arbitrary: le funk, le hip hop, le disco, le rock are masculine, while la soul or la pop are feminine. In point of fact, it transpires that the same borrowings take on different genders depending upon whether they were borrowed by French in France, Quebec in Canada or in other French-speaking areas: (une) interview and (un) job are feminine and masculine respectively in France, yet in Quebec they are m and f
(un) interview, (une) job; local variants also turn up: la soul is f in Le Monde (12.9.03) and in Le Petit Larousse (as translation for ‘aˆme’), but in

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Le Robert it is le soul. Other nouns are also either m or f
le or la black, depending upon whether the reference is to a man or a woman. Borrowed adjectives

Whereas in French adjectives agree in gender and number with the nouns they modify, borrowed adjectives tend to remain unchanged, as in English: (46) des arrangements pop ‘pop arrangements’, une rythmique rock ‘rock rhythmics’, la re´volution free ‘the free revolution’, une formation soul ‘a soul formation’, la musique country ‘country music’, les yeux husky ‘husky blue eyes’, la musique black ‘black music’. The plural

As in French, a voiceless final ‘s’ tends to mark the plural form of English borrowed nouns, and one finds then: les supermarkets, les hippies, les stars, les reporters pronounced the French way, without pronouncing the ‘s’: /les supermarket, hippie, star/ and /reporter/. Nouns may be also invariable, and the plural form is only marked thanks to French plural articles such as les, des, ces, mes. Moreover, the ‘man’ suffix may either take the plural form, ‘men’, like in English
les jazzmen, les tennismen, les barmen, or the voiceless French affix ‘s’; un barman, for example, will also then become des barmans, pronounced/ barman/. Neologisms

The creation of new words happens frequently in French, as indicated above: verbs get formed based upon borrowings, following generally the French first verbal model which usually ends -er: tester, (se) doper, mixer; nouns are formed by adding the French suffixes -tion, -eur (m), -euse (f), -age, -iste as in sponsorisation, sprinteur and sprinteuse or prefixes like sur and anti. One then finds families of words, such as the various derivations from the borrowings dope and doping0 dopeur, dopage, anti-dopage; or the derivations of stock 0the verb stocker, and the nouns stockage, stockiste or surstockage. Adjectives are also formed by adding the suffixes -ant and -ard, thus: flash 0flashant; stress 0stressant; snob 0snobinard.

Conclusion In 2004, 40 years after the ‘franglais crisis’ of the 1960s, it was already possible to get both diachronic and synchronic perspectives on the phenomenon of Anglicisation, and to evaluate it with more objectivity. For some researchers, this phenomenon is only a fashion, a trend or

English Borrowings in French

63

primarily the language of the young. They point out that some borrowings are more easily absorbed than others, many become dated and disappear with the disappearance of the concept they represent. Several researchers respond that certain borrowings fall out of use after some time, others remain for good and still others replace those that are gone, or serve simultaneously with them, reflecting new realities (hi-fi, night club replacing for instance pick-up or dancing). Moreover derivation perpetuates the life chances of borrowings. The word gag adopted in 1922, becomes, for instance, gaguesque in 1977; gadget (1946) becomes gadge´tisation (1968) and gadge´tiser (1970); film (1889) becomes filmer (1908), filmage (1912), filmeur (1917), filmable (1927), filmique (1936), filmographique (1937) and filmothe`que (1967) (Robert, 2001).15 Yet, purists are still fighting against the Franglais phenomenon, lamenting that people use English terms such as hard, challenge or gay for dur, de´fi or homosexuel, and also complaining that borrowings continue to invade the domains of music, sport, communication, press and advertisements (Cholewka, 2000; Yaguello, 2000). They try to save endangered words and time and time again come back with new arguments, hoping to safeguard French against the ‘English danger’ (Laroche-Claire, 2004; Pivot, 2004). Institutions
the Acade´mie Franc¸aise, the De´le´gation Ge´ne´rale a` la Langue Franc¸aise and the Commissions Ministe´rielles de Terminologie, as already mentioned
are in charge of what they view as the ‘desirable’ development of French. Laws, such as ‘la loi Toubon’16 and others were suggested in order to limit the English penetration of French. Such decisions are in fact of little effect.17 English borrowings remain numerous and have undoubtedly become a part of the French language. Anglicisation is today more vivid than ever. The linguists’ and committed activists’ campaign of the 1960s against the influence of English has drastically declined even though a certain anxiety subsists, and there still are scholars who think like Voirol (1990: 7) in the 1990s: One must not proclaim that French is in danger and brandish the crusade flag. There is no pure language ( . . .). All languages owe something to others. French has nourished English, English has nourished French. Yet for half a century, the linguistic balance between the two languages is in deficit to the detriment of French. To resist Anglomania does not mean giving in to Anglophobia. We will keep week end, foot-ball, sex-appeal, and many others which are useful, since we have not found any better. For the newcomers,

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however, let us pay attention. Let’s adopt words (. . . .) let’ s try to invent and create new ones. In the study presented here, we set ourselves two key questions as research targets: (1) to paint a general picture of the current phenomenon of borrowings, based on data gathered between 2001 and 2004; and (2) strictly limiting ourselves to the field of borrowings, to check whether this lexical penetration represented an existential threat for French. Our general impression is that the penetration of English into the French lexicon is a productive and dynamic process, whether speaking of English terms adopted ‘as is’, or terms undergoing change or serving as a source for lexical neologisms. This process takes place when French equivalents for the English adopted terms do not exist, but is also very common when equivalents are found. The borrowed terms, then, often set themselves apart from their so-called equivalents and present specific semantic nuances. Dated borrowings have sometimes disappeared or been replaced by new ones, according to new social or technological developments, yet this is an ongoing process, where dated as well as new adopted words or new combinations live and develop together. Some semantic fields are more involved than others (sport, music, politics), yet it is practically impossible to predict which terms will be kept in French. Certain English forms (short words, -ing terms or specific structures) appear to be more easily integrated. The reasons for borrowing remain above all functional
the need to express new things that do not yet have a word in common usage in French, and which in this world of globalisation are in any case understood in English. Introducing English words allows speakers to go beyond the physical and linguistic areas of daily life. It also lets speakers play with words, in order to reinforce a statement or differentiate concepts. It is, in fact, another means of expression for French L1 speakers, in written and oral discourse. Furthermore, it is also undeniable that in today’s globalised world, English enjoys a particular prestige, and it seems that many a concept originating from American/ English discourse is willingly adopted as a marker of ‘updatedness’, especially among the young, but not only among them. Hence the analysis of our data has shown, in accordance with Pergnier, Walter and others, that borrowings often represent new realities and semantic shades; they are virtual reservoirs for new connotative and denotative values, and contribute to the building of new symbols. What can be learned from our analysis is that Anglicisation is almost unavoidable in contact situations engendered by contemporary globalisation.

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Yet, when referring to French, it does not come instead of or at the detriment of French. For Etiemble and many others after him, the influence of English on French was and remains an existential threat to French. Two key facts which we encountered in our findings refute this approach. The first is that data definitely show that borrowings do not prevent the speakers from sticking to French as their ‘matrix language’ (Myers-Scotton, 1993), in the written and oral discourse with respect to all areas and subjects considered in our research. Hence, while the phenomenon of borrowing is very much alive, the practice of codeswitching, or moving from one language to another, as it is the case of some languages in other contact situations (Ben-Rafael, 2001a, 2004a; Heller, 1988; Myers-Scotton, 1993), has hardly appeared in material. The second fact is that, in our data, despite the important lexical penetration of English, grammar remains essentially French. This relates to the assessment by many scholars that grammar generally constitutes the heart of the language and is relatively resistant to external linguistic influences (Hage`ge, 1987, 2000). Grammatical changes are slow (LeemanBouix, 1994; Walter, 1988), and it is only when grammar is affected in its hard core that we can speak of the beginning of a genuine language shift (Hage`ge, 2000). It has been shown, moreover, that secondary grammatical changes
like in Que´be´cois (Chantefort, 1976; Martineau, 1985), Acadian and Ontario French (King, 1989; Mougeon & Beniak, 1989, 1991) or Franbreu18 (Ben-Rafael, 2002, 2004a)
are not enough to cause the transformation or attrition of a living language. As far as English borrowings are concerned, our data confirm that they are integrated in the French of France according to French grammatical rules. The same applies to neologisms also drawn from English and mostly built a` la franc¸aise. We then may conclude that French is not in danger as long as French grammar is not endangered, and agree with Yaguello (2000) when she says: Franglais . . . one should not make a big fuss about it because what is important for the resistance of a language, is its grammatical structure, and its own syntax and morphology; as long as French conjugates English verbs ‘a` la franc¸aise’ like: se crasher, surfer, cocooner, sponsoriser . . . everything is ok. Etiemble saw Franglais as a ‘sabir’ responding to his famous acronym ‘ESTEL’ (En Sabir tout est licit/‘in Sabir everything is allowed/legal/ licit’). French, he proclaimed, was disintegrating under the influence of English, and both its vocabulary and grammar were heading for

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catastrophe and anarchism. As for us, we see rather the penetration of English in French as innovativeness and dynamism, indicating that French speakers today live at the same time in a global world and in their own culture. Notes 1. This chapter refers to the French spoken in France. While the French of other Francophone countries shares numerous characteristics with the French of France, there are also numerous differences attributable to the differences in language contact situations. 2. The current tendency is to view codeswitching through a continuum of alternations, starting from the single unit to the largest segments (GardnerChloros, 2000; Myers-Scotton, 1993; Romaine, 1989). Various names are used instead of ‘borrowings’, such as adoption, cloning, insertion, etc. Although I agree with this attitude, and have often called borrowings, ‘unitarian codeswitchings’ or ‘insertion’ (Ben-Rafael, 2001b), I will use here the term ‘borrowing’ for the sake of clarity. 3. Etiemble writes intentionally sarcastically ‘atlantic’ (with ‘c’), as in English, instead of ‘atlantique’, but he retains the French structure of nounadjective/ ‘sabir atlantic’ as against the English structure of ‘Atlantic sabir’. This is one of the numerous means he uses to express his opposition to the penetration of English into French. 4. Le Cornec argues in favour of national linguistic reforms imitating those already implemented in some regions of France. During the 1980s, for instance, the Orne region requested that road signals as well as texts on monuments should appear only in French. An attempt was also made to replace words such as ‘camping’, ‘parking’ with terms such as campie`re, camperie, campement, etc. (Le Cornec, 1982: 309
310). 5. In 1989, for example, the Dictionary of Neologisms suggested a preference for condense´ over digest, exclusivite´ over scoop, boutique franche over duty free and voyagiste over tour-operator (Lenoble-Pinson, 1991). In 2000, the Commission of Terminology proposed lists of equivalents in the area of finance, to make it unnecessary to use foreign terms
aide de caisse for bagman, chef de file for leader and direction de la mercatique for marketing management (CGTN1, 2000). In the field of computers, one proposed, among other terms, e´cran controˆle for monitor, traitement de texte for text processing and mise a` niveau for upgrading (CGTN2, 2000). 6. On websites one may find lists of borrowings to be substituted by French terms; the lists appear under headings such as: ‘Il ne faut pas dire’ (one is not to say) versus ‘Il faut dire’ (one should say) or anglicismes (anglicisms) versus bon franc¸ais (good French); for example: job versus boulot, coach versus entraineur, air bag versus sac d’air, etc. 7. Walker’s research on Anglicisms in different Francophone communities was carried out with a questionnaire sent out to Francophone students from France (Albi, Paris, Reims, Rouen and Strasbourg), Africa (Benin, Cameroon, Madagascar, Senegal) and Vietnam.

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8. This phonetic comment, valid for borrowings with equivalents, is also valid where there are none. We therefore do not take this into consideration in what follows. Further, the problem of pronunciation is diminishing, and the variation between the English/American accent and French pronunciation of borrowed terms is becoming ever less marked on account of globalisation (the media, travel, etc.). 9. In Hebrew, on the contrary, one finds the equivalent ‘boker’, which is quite current in oral and written discourse, in children’s stories. Yet together with boker, the English term cowboy is also used. 10. As already mentioned, this will not be discussed here. Many such examples are quoted in Picone (1996). 11. Round means turn, too, yet it also has the additional connotation of competition, boxing, tournament. 12. Mr and Mrs Bush, living in France, Frenchify their name to M. and Mme. Buisson. In the USA, french fries have, for some Americans, become freedom fries. In the New York Times 26.3.03, it is written, ‘boycott everything French’. On chat groups, there were over 3000 messages calling for a boycott between 15 and 26 March. The brands most often cited by French speakers in this period are only French ones: Air France, Evian, Renault, Alcatel and Nissan (article by Laure Belot, in Le Monde, 29.3.03). 13. In the text, next to the little known borrowing ‘imbedded’, there is also a French translation in inverted commas. This is not a common addition, but here it makes things easier for the reader. 14. What the merchant said was translated from Iraqi Arabic to French, except for ‘business’, which remained in English. 15. French neologisms may be offered as alternatives, yet are not necessarily accepted, or are used together with borrowed words; one finds the French new term
un baladeur, but also the English borrowing
un walkman. 16. The Toubon law (4 August 1994) rules, among other dispositions, that consumer goods must not be sold without French instructions, and that English advertisements must not be shown in French cinemas; bilingual advertisements must not display the French part of their message in characters smaller than the English part, etc. 17. In her report of 1 July 2003 on linguistic practice in French companies, Catherine Tasca, for example, considers that ‘the findings give the impression of the weakness of French in the corporate world’. She concludes that there should be more stringent monitoring of the implementation of the Toubon law (www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/dglf/politique-langue/rapporttasca.html). 18. The French of veteran French-speaking immigrants in Israel carrying numerous influences from Hebrew.

Chapter 4

Dutch: Is It Threatened by English? HERMAN J. DE VRIES JR.1

Most visitors to the Netherlands quickly observe how remarkably adept the Dutch are with the English language. In fact, linguistic versatility has long been a source of Dutch national pride. Some Dutch people fear, however, that this versatility has driven their own language into a danger zone. In 1997, two parliamentarians, one each from the Netherlands and Belgian governments, decried the influence of English in a report they submitted to the Dutch Language Union (Nederlandse Taalunie), a governmental organisation subsidised by each country. The report expressed concern that English
particularly hi-tech English
was polluting the Dutch language. That same year, two Dutch parliamentarians submitted a proposal to constitutionally anchor the use of the Dutch language in the Netherlands. Although the proposal was ultimately unsuccessful, a robust discussion about the state of the Dutch language ensued in Dutch media for months following the report (Het Nederlands, 1997; Kwetsbare taal, 1997). The sentiments of those concerned are perhaps best summarised in an article in a major Dutch paper, the headline of which reads: ‘Sounding the Alarm: Dutch is Disappearing!’ (ten Hooven, 1998, my translation). How serious is this supposed threat to the Dutch language? Which issues are at hand? These are the questions pursued in this chapter. But first some basic information is offered by way of introduction. Dutch is the language spoken by some 21 million people, most of them residing in the delta region of Northwest Europe where the waters of the great rivers Rhine and Maas empty into the North Sea (Vandeputte et al., 1989; de Vries et al., 1995). This area, often collectively called the Low Lands, comprises the Netherlands and Belgium. Dutch is the primary language in all of the Netherlands, the population of which is approximately 16 million. Dutch is also spoken by some five million Belgians, most residing in that country’s northern regions, which are collectively called Flanders. In addition, Dutch is spoken by several 68

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hundred thousand people on the islands of the Netherlands Antilles and nearby Suriname on the South American mainland (Shetter, 2002; van der Horst & Marschall, 2000). The issues related to the status and health of the Dutch language vary in each of these specific linguistic regions. The historical role of Dutch in Belgium, for example, differs significantly from that in the Netherlands. Having had to battle the government for a rightful place alongside French, Flemish Belgians are said to have a stronger emotional bond to the Dutch language than do their Dutch neighbours to the north (Wils, 2001). Though the language issues in Flanders are considerable and significant, they fall outside my expertise and the scope of this chapter, and will therefore not be addressed here. Dutch stems from the Indo-Germanic language family whose offshoots grew into diverse Germanic languages, which include North Germanic (Scandinavian), East Germanic (Gothic
now extinct) and West Germanic languages, where Dutch is situated alongside its linguistic relatives German and English. Using this familiar image of the language tree, it can be said that Dutch finds itself on the same branch as English and German; in fact, it is positioned between the two. Dutch evolved amongst two Germanic tribes, the Franks and the Saxons. Unlike German, Dutch never underwent the Second Sound Shift that led to some of the consonants one finds in German. And unlike English, in which vowel combinations have flattened in pronunciation, Dutch has retained numerous complex vowel diphthongs. In a linguistic sense, Dutch is a form of low German, a fact reflected in the name, Nederduits (literally, ‘Lower German’), which was the official lexical term used for the language until the early 20th century. The form of Dutch that is understood by 21 million speakers today and taught in schools is technically referred to as Standard Dutch (references to ‘Dutch’ in this chapter indicate this standard form). Standard Dutch itself derives primarily from one particular dialect, Hollands, which was spoken in the urban conglomerate in the western province of Holland (now two provinces, North and South Holland). The dialect of Holland ascended to become the standard variety of Dutch for reasons that have to do with two potent forces in Holland during the 17th century, its Golden Age: economics and religion. Cities in the province of Holland, such as the capital and port city, Amsterdam, as well as the bustling merchant city and cultural centre of Haarlem were the shaping forces of the economy and the arts. The Holland dialect naturally became de facto the form of Dutch used for commerce. Religious developments also helped propel the Holland dialect into universal use in the low lands. The ascendancy of Calvinist Protestantism during the 16th century

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led to religious hegemony in the northern provinces of the Low Countries. Though the traditional view is occasionally challenged (van der Sijs, 2004), longstanding linguistic history maintains that the Statenbijbel (States Bible), a vernacular translation of the Bible commissioned by the States General in 1648, served as a chief linguistic unifier. Being for centuries the authoritative Christian scriptural text and state Bible, the Statenbijbel enjoyed a status akin to that of the King James Bible in the English-speaking world and exercised a powerful shaping force in linguistic and idiomatic developments in the Netherlands (Donaldson, 1983). Nowadays, many Dutch
particularly those living in eastern provinces
still refer to standard Dutch as Hollands. Whereas the Dutch now officially call their language Nederlands, the colloquial label Hollands serves as a constant reminder of the geographic and historic origins of the language’s standard form. The English label for the language, Dutch, holds enough potential for semantic confusion
particularly for speakers of English or German
to warrant a brief comment here. Dutch is an obvious cognate of Deutsch (German for the German language). The phonetic kinship of Dutch and Deutsch has historically caused problems for the Dutch in Englishspeaking regions. For example, amidst the anti-German sentiment in America during the First World War, Dutch immigrants saw their native tongue maligned by virtue of association. Not only did Dutch sound like German to untrained American ears, but also the language’s traditional designation as ‘Low German’ furthered the association. What is more, Duits (which considerably resembles Dutch) is the Dutch word denoting the German language. Thus the very nomenclature of the language of the Low Lands has, over the centuries, shown itself to be remarkably flexible and sometimes vulnerable.

Contacts with Other Languages During the latter 16th and 17th centuries
Holland’s Golden Age
the maritime supremacy of the Dutch brought them to every corner of the globe. The resulting traffic in the harbour city of Amsterdam made it already then a richly cosmopolitan city. Thus, not coincidentally, the 16th century was a period which first saw scholarly attempts to limit the influence of other languages on Dutch. These developments coincided with movements in linguistic purism which themselves grew out of emphases on the vernacular cultivated in the Renaissance. Such developments overlapped further with the heyday of the chambers of rhetoric (rederijkers)
meetings in which Dutch poets would parade their latest

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writing. As literary guilds, the rederijkers served as important instruments in the cultivation of the vernacular within intellectual circles. The scholarly focus encouraged during the Renaissance also resulted in various attempts to standardise the spelling and grammar of Dutch. The Dictionarium of 1574 stands at the beginning of a long tradition of lexicography in the Netherlands. An important early work to standardise the spelling was Pontus de Heuiter’s Nederduitse Orthographie (Dutch Orthography) of 1581. But Dutch intellectuals were also keen to rid Dutch of loan words from other languages. Latin words were naturally prevalent in academic and clerical Dutch, as they were in all European languages emerging from the middle ages. There also was an incorporated body of Spanish vocabulary to deal with, too, as the low lands were a territory reigned by the King of Spain until Dutch liberation after the Eighty-Year War (1568
1648). Language purists of the 16th and 17th centuries were particularly keen to rid Dutch of French loan words. The force of French courtly culture was deeply felt in the Dutch cultural establishment; so, naturally, French made deep inroads into the Dutch vernacular. Ironically, the Dutch sometimes turned to German to find replacement for French loan words, as at that time the distinction between German and Dutch was not felt as acutely as today (Donaldson, 1983: 104). The Dutch language faced the force of the French language, in fact, time and again. Whereas the 16th century dealt with the cumulative effect of French courtly culture on the Dutch language, the 18th and 19th centuries would similarly deal with the linguistic force of French due to the Napoleonic hegemony. This was the case particularly from 1806 to 1815 when the Netherlands and Belgium belonged to the Kingdom of France. As the overview sketched above suggests, the Dutch have been internationally oriented and intercultural for centuries. Nowadays, in our world of ‘globalisation’, the international presence of the Netherlands is similarly evident. In the realms of art and culture, Dutch orchestras and museums are known worldwide. In the realm of commerce, the Dutch also keep a high international profile with transnational corporations like Philips and Shell. The country’s bustling airport, Schiphol, as an international hub, allows the Dutch interaction with foreigners on a daily basis. It has long been maintained that centuries of sustained exposure to other cultures, other peoples and other languages has decidedly shaped Dutch mentality and imagination. As a result, people in the Netherlands are notoriously open to foreign ideas and influence. They have, it is said, a natural receptivity to the spoken tongues of other

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peoples
and they are remarkably adept at learning to speak those languages as well.

Extent of English in Dutch Society and the European Union As is widely known by professional linguists and uneducated world citizens alike, the English language has become a dominant force in many areas around the globe (Nettle & Romaine, 2000). English has made formidable inroads into Dutch culture, particularly since the postWWII era, and has been increasingly found in many spheres of linguistic and cultural life in the Netherlands. Let us observe some examples of English used in entertainment, business, politics and education in the Dutch society
one need not go far to find them. In Dutch entertainment the examples are myriad. Dutch television broadcasts a sizeable number of foreign programmes and films, and as a rule the media provide Dutch subtitles rather than dub the voices into Dutch (whereas in countries such as Germany and France dubbing is the norm). Also, nearly every Dutch household has access to cable television in which basic offerings include the American Cable News Network (CNN) and even Music Television (MTV). Therefore, children who watch television grow up hearing countless hours of English. The radio waves are filled with English-language pop music, and many Dutch singers perform their songs in English too. Dutch contestants in the European Song Festival have sometimes sung in English. In Amsterdam one easily converses in English with virtually anyone working in the tourist, entertainment or culture industries. The preponderance of non-native Dutch (‘allochtonen’) in Amsterdam
over 50% of the residents
further encourages English as the city’s lingua franca in many aspects of social life. English seems equally ubiquitous in the Dutch museum culture as well (De Nijn, 1999; van Heugten, 1999). Examples of such preference for English are abundant in the market place as well. One count shows that over 160 occupations are referred to by English job titles (Ridder, 1995). Research summarised by Renkema et al. (2003) documents that 15% of advertisement to Dutch readers is written in English, and a third of television ads use English terms. Where one once saw the word ‘korting’ displayed in retail store windows, one now often sees the English equivalent, ‘sale.’ And even within Dutch corporations themselves, English has made significant inroads. Philips, for example, ran an improvement campaign under the English slogan: ‘Let’s make things better’. And, not surprisingly, computer-related speech in the Netherlands is deluged with anglicisms. Here are but a

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few examples: browsen, deleten, inloggen, upgraden, emailen (meaning ‘to browse’, ‘to delete’, etc.), hardware, software, downloaden, chatten, clikken; and even hybrid forms like searchopties (search options) and dubbelclikken (double clicking). P. Stroop’s (2003) analysis of 8000 e-mails received or sent by one salesman revealed that on average one English word is used in every single e-mail composed
a frequency that Stroop contends none would consider exaggerated. In higher education the trend is similar. Scores of professional schools and colleges of various universities offer courses taught in English (van Bree, 1999). Indeed, Dutch competence with the English language is no superficial matter. In fact, the linguistic self-confidence is so great that, in the 1990s, the Minister of Education (J.M.M. Ritzen) suggested that English should become the operative language of Dutch higher education (Devoldere, 2002). It was possible for Minister Ritzen to advance this position as the Netherlands constitution nowhere anchors Dutch exclusively as the official language. By contrast, fellow European countries such as Germany, Sweden, Italy, Portugal, Luxembourg, Ireland and France constitutionally protect their official languages (van der Burg, 1997). Even though Minister Ritzen’s suggestions never materialised in governmental policy change, his comments did initiate significant debate on the subject. And while many view such a language shift in the universities as very unlikely, the mere fact that such a proposal could be discussed speaks volumes for the country’s view of its own language and for the people’s estimation of their own ability with the English language (Ringeling, 1997). Government agencies have also shown a trend to use English. During the Bosnian crisis in the 1990s, when the Dutch armed forces found themselves under critical scrutiny in the debacle at Srebrenica, the Minister of Defence responded by establishing an internal department under the English title: ‘Lessons Learned’ (Freriks, 1998). Similarly, a federal report analysing the potential of building a high-speed railway appeared under the English title ‘High Speed Train’. One of the reasons that the earlier mentioned representatives submitted their proposal to anchor the Dutch language constitutionally was their apparent frustration with the minister of Foreign Affairs, Van den Broek, who ‘spoke English all the time and everywhere’ (Nederlands al voldoende beschermd, 1997; Schoof, 1997). Likewise they were put off by the Green-Left party, which was wont to post English signs and notes within the parliamentary working quarters. In the arena of international politics, the English-language factor becomes obviously more complex (Bolkestein, 2004). As of this writing in

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the year 2004, the European Union counts 25 member states and 20 officially recognised languages. Even the staunchest purists in the Netherlands would agree that pragmatics call for some degree of English as part of the Dutch EU parliamentary work. As such, the language politics played out by the Dutch in the EU provide an opportune case study of the possibilities and perils involved with a Dutch-like readiness to use English in their political negotiations. As one of the original four languages of the former European Community (1958), Dutch has always enjoyed the protection still granted to member countries of the European Union. Currently, the ‘Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe’ states that ‘[e]very person may write to the institutions of the Union in one of the languages of the Constitution and must have an answer in the same language’ (Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe, 2004: Article II-101.4). Simultaneous interpreters are likewise available for hearings in the union’s various legislative and judicial bodies. But the Dutch have been wont and willing to speak in English in the EU sessions
a reality that sometimes irritates simultaneous interpreters who then have difficulties with the ‘Dutchness’ of the parliamentarians’ English idiom (Donker, 1988; Ester, 1999). While all languages are officially equal, it seems that some are more equal than others. The judges at the Court of Justice in Luxembourg, for example, communicate in French, the preferred language of ‘Eurocrats’. The European Commission uses French, German and English. Occasionally, the Dutch are starkly reminded that language itself is politics in the EU. In 1997, the Dutch displayed surprising but unequivocal defensiveness when Environment Minister De Boer submitted a protest against Austria, the chair of the Union, after a decision was made to use only Spanish, English, French and German at an important meeting (Nederlandse taal inzet ruzie met EU, 1998). Because of incidents like this and others (such as the French proposal in 1994 to restrict the European Union’s languages), the Dutch have taken some notable stands to defend the use of their language (van der Burg, 1997). For the foreseeable future, the Dutch language enjoys security in the European Union, and they will do well to take advantage of the impartiality toward languages that still prevails in the EU (van Bree, 1999). But given the recent growth to 25 member states, it appears imminent that the debates over language use in the EU will intensify (Thyssen, 2002). In response to the prevalence of English
suggested in the above overview
Dutch language purists have set up forts to defend against the advancement of English. The most prominent example hereof is the

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Stichting Nederlands (translated literally: foundation for the Dutch language). The goal of this foundation, formally launched in 1999, is to promote the use of the Dutch language. As part of its strategy, the organisation has assembled a running list of some 1200 frequently used English words along with their Dutch equivalents. The Stichting Nederlands grew out of a task force assembled by the society (and same named journal) Onze Taal (‘Our Language’), which is considered a premiere linguistic observer of trends in the Dutch language. During its initial years in the early 20th century, Onze Taal played the watchdog role of language purism that the Stichting Nederlands does today. However, back then the intruder was not English but German. Over the course of the 20th century, the journal Onze Taal has abandoned the role of strident defender of the Dutch language, and favours now a more passive role of observer of language trends (Sanders, 2002).

Evaluation of the ‘English Problem’ Given the complexities of the English problem for the Dutch language, it will prove helpful to make some crucial distinctions, as two rather separate phenomena are at work. One trend is that the Dutch, with striking frequency, choose to communicate in English. The second phenomenon is the apparent mark that the English language is making on the Dutch language. In analysing these phenomena we will have to gauge, in the first matter, both why the Dutch are speaking English and to what extent this is actually happening. In the second matter we shall need to determine to what extent English is eroding Dutch, and whether Dutch can survive the onslaught. In other words, concerns are heard about the situation of the Dutch language as it faces the external reality of English as a competing mode of communication. In addition, the Dutch language must, internally, deal with the influence of English on its own linguistic system (de Vries, 2001; van Bree, 1999). Let us address the phenomena in that order. The first theory suggested
that the Dutch language is being displaced by English
begs the question of cause or effect. If the rise of English is an effect or the result of a process already underway, then we could expect to trace it to an intrinsic deficiency in Dutch itself. The inadequacy of such a presumable cause is, however, suggested by the general observation that Dutch or regional dialects are still, to an overwhelming degree, the languages spoken in homes, schools, churches, clubs and over neighbours’ fences in the Netherlands and Flanders. Even though much Internet activity, for example, might take

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place in English, such high-tech interaction encompasses by no means all of one’s verbal interaction in the course of a day. While anglicisms and the like may pepper the speech of urban types at the work place, Dutch is the nation’s language for most of life’s basic spheres and activities such as for family, friends, news, intimacy, verbal and literary expression, and the like. In other words, the Dutch still speak Dutch. The appropriate reminder here is that if indeed Dutch is disappearing, it is due to the force of English in the linguistic environment. Thus, while Dutch itself remains a vibrant language, it is here and there replaced by another
in this case, English
which functions as an invasive species, to use a biological metaphor. To which degree Dutch is being supplanted is an increasingly important question, for the issue at hand is the addition of another language into the culture. In the midst of such a presumable transition to a new multilingualism, however, it is crucial to note the vibrant persistence of the Dutch language itself. Some argue that we are, in fact, now witnessing the functional development of a new professional bilingualism (Bakker, 1998). An articulation of this view is found in a recent book by van Oostendorp, Steenkolen Engels (2002, loosely translated as ‘Broken English’). Van Oostendorp exemplifies an unreserved pragmatic approach to dealing with English. His argument proceeds from what he considers the obvious observation that ‘broken English’ has become a lingua franca, and asserts that we will all do well to let this development have its way. What van Oostendorp means by ‘broken English’ is the same thing that the Dutch Language Union Report (Rapport Werkgroep Europa) intimates with the term ‘deculturalised English’, which is to say an English not bound to a particular English-speaking culture (Devoldere, 2002; the report, section 1.1.4.) The key to the success of ‘broken English’ as a lingua franca, so continues the argument, is to accept the imperfections of such English and allow vast variations of the language as part of the common tool for communication. The sooner everyone relaxes grammatical rules and lowers idiomatic expectations, the better. A notable part of van Oostendorp’s thesis of Steenkolen Engels is his two-fold insistence that Dutch is neither significantly corrupted by English, nor dying out because of English. For van Oostendorp, the phenomenon of English in Dutch culture is one of a new bilingualism (or, for many, a trilingualism, given the continued presence of regional dialects). In other words, English is for many Dutch citizens essentially an additional tool or yet another skill at their disposal for their international way of life.

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While there is something attractive and even admirable about van Oostendorp’s view, one wonders whether there is not some unwarranted overconfidence in the effectiveness of communication with such a freefor-all English that is abstract and untied to specific cultural and traditional meanings. A good example of this problem is evident, ironically, in the book’s very title word, which van Oostendorp (2002: 52) explains in an appended English-language pre´cis, ‘Summary in Stonecoal English’: Due to a combination of historical accidents and serious bloodshed, approximately 25 percent of the world population speaks English now. Within the Netherlands, this number is as high as roughly 90 percent, according to some assessments. The English these people speak is not uniform and in many ways does not resemble the English that is spoken by native speakers in Britain or the United States. Within the Netherlands, it is sometimes referred to as ‘steenkolen-Engels’
‘Stonecoal English’. This is a pejorative term, but I argue that it could be used in a positive way as well. If English is going to be such an important language in the world, everybody will have a right to it, not just the native speakers. The linguistic problem that remains unsolved throughout van Oostendorp’s summary is a semantic one. The English speaker will puzzle over the word stonecoal as modifier of the noun English. (My Webster’s New College Dictionary, in fact, does not even list stonecoal as an entry.) It is only after consultation with native speakers of Dutch that one will arrive at the conclusion that one of the images that ‘steenkool’ evokes in the Dutch mind is that of broken pieces of coal. For the native English speaker, however, coal connotes things like energy source, air pollution and perhaps the idea of petrification. It does not connote something broken or substandard. My point here is not to castigate a non-native English speaker for getting the nuance of an English term wrong. But one must point out the regrettable irony that a crucial semantic misunderstanding arises from the very title of a book devoted to the thesis that non-native English speakers should cheerfully embrace English as a lingua franca in the interest of better intercultural communication. Perhaps more caution is in order before the Dutch fall headlong into an embrace of a functional Dutch/English bilingualism. The second question concerns the internal transitions within Dutch due to English as an intrusive, polluting and ultimately savaging force. Linguists and language pedagogues have been addressing this issue in the press and academic journals for some time. In contrast to the

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response of the purists, an overall optimism prevails among linguists regarding the health and future of Dutch (Stroop, 1997; van der Horst, 1995, 1997; van der Sijs, 1998). Although some linguists express concern (van Marle, 2004), most have tended to claim, instead, that many of the linguistic adaptations of English are not danger signals for Dutch, but rather indicators of the health and adaptability of the Dutch language (Verkuyl, 1998). For much of the analysis that follows here, I am indebted to one linguist in particular, C.J.W. Zwart (1999; see also de Vries, 2001.) Linguists and philologists have traditionally observed two primary scenarios of language change. One way is where one group of speakers finds itself in a subordinate social role to a stratum of speakers of a different language, who, though they wield the power, are far fewer in number. In this strata-based manner of language change, the substratum is compelled to adopt the language of the superstratum. This phenomenon explains, for example, the inception of Europe’s Romance languages, such as French. The phenomenon also accounts for the Afrikaans language. The substratum succeeds in taking on the superstratum’s vocabulary, but is only partially successful in adopting the other language’s system, i.e. syntax and morphology, including inflexion. As a result, a new mixed language is formed. The speakers in the superstratum are dramatically fewer in number, so they soon adapt to the newly formed hybrid language. Regarding such strata-based language change, the obvious is quickly noted: namely, that no such dynamic of social strata is involved in the current question of Dutch and the English languages. A second manner in which a language can fundamentally change is through appropriating loan words, also called borrowing. In the most extreme examples, one language borrows so many words of the language with which it is in contact that the former is altered to the point where it becomes a third language that is a lexical hybrid. Such is the case, for example, with Mitchif, the language of the Canadian prairie lands, which some linguists describe as an example of ‘language intertwining’. Mitchif is a mixture of Cree and French that came about around 1800 when many fur traders married Native American women of the area. In Mitchif the verbs, personal pronouns, interrogatives and demonstratives are largely Cree, whereas the nouns, adjectives, adverbs, articles and numerals are largely French. Speakers of Mitchif can often speak neither Cree nor French (Callaghan & Gamble, 1996). Current linguistic research indicates that Dutch examples of borrowing are nowhere near such a level as in the Mitchif case. Compelling studies suggest a low cause for concern regarding loan words from

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English. In her book, Geleend en uitgeleend (Borrowed and Loaned) van der Sijs (1998: 181ff.) summarises numerous studies of the use of loan words in the press. She and others estimate that around 20
30% of the words are loan words of foreign origin. But most of these words have been commonplace for decades, even generations; they include such common vocabulary as: politie (‘police’), zich (‘self’), raket (‘racket’), radio, club, sport, sce´ne, citaat (‘citation’) and etcetera. One study estimates that only around 10% of all loan words used in the press are borrowed from English. Some concerned language observers might contest such attempts at reassurance from history, claiming that the percentage of English loan words is dramatically increasing at present. But of all the words that, since 1985, have been newly added to the Dutch dictionary, Hedendaags Nederlands (‘Present-day Dutch’), only 11.3% of these are loan words
and only a fraction of those words are from English. We ought also to bear in mind that many of these words
particularly those of high-tech jargon
appear to undergo ‘dutchification’ nearly at the same rate with which they entered the language. Thus, words like diskette, hard drive, word processor and keyboard are with increasing frequency referred to, respectively, as: schijfje, harde schijf, tekstverwerker and toetsenbord. Sales of computer software show a similar trend. For example, 80% of Dutch consumers choose the Dutch version (over the English version) of the Windows operating system. As Zwart asserts
the system always wins. That is to say, grammar and linguistic basics, such as pronunciation, intonation, syntax and morphology (including plural formation) seem convincingly impervious to significant alteration due to English influence. In fact, where Dutch does seem to show some syntactic evolution, the impulse appears to be more from non-English linguistic cultures such as the Suriname
a pronounced segment of youth culture in Amsterdam (Reinders, 1998; van der Horst, 1995; van Kempen, 2000). With respect to pronunciation: English words like goal, quiz and off side are pronounced in Dutch as kool or chool, kwis and afsijt. The accent of a word like ‘stewardess has become stewar’dess in Dutch. The plural of kwis (for ‘quiz’) is not formed with the English ‘s’ (kwisses) but rather with the Dutch ‘n’
kwissen; likewise the plural of stewardess is stewardessen, not ‘stewardesses’. Even in gender formation, the Dutch system adapts words according to its own rules. Thus, ‘dashboard’ becomes in Dutch a neuter noun requiring the definite article ‘het’ (het dashbord). ‘Credit card’, however, is rendered with ‘de’ which is the definite article used with masculine and feminine nouns (de creditcard). English, of course, knows no gender distinctions with the articles and uses only the definite article ‘the’.

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There are more examples. English loan words are inflected and given endings according to the Dutch rules, such that the diminutive of kwis (quiz) is a kwisje, a female typist is a typiste (her male counterpart is a typist). Adjectives like ‘clever’ and ‘hip’ become clevere and hippe in certain situations (clevere en hippe studenten: ‘clever and hip students’). Comparative and superlative degrees of modifiers likewise follow the Dutch grammatical system. Thus we have hippere and hippste and coolere and coolste studenten (and not the English superlatives: hippest and coolest). In past tense formation we see the same phenomenon. A computer file, once ‘ctrls’ has been pushed, has been gesaved
or geseefd (the Dutch are still sorting out the spelling, but either way, it is clearly the Dutch past participle formation system at work
not the English one). With a few minor exceptions (de Vries, 2001), there has been little significant, systematic alteration of the Dutch language due to incursion from English. The number of loan words from English remains relatively small, and the Dutch linguistic system is stable and robust enough quickly to press foreign words into its own mould. The Dutch allow these words to enrich their language, as it were. And many of these words, particularly those from the high-tech sector, are just that: words used in one distinct linguistic setting. There is thus a built-in self-containment for these vocabulary groupings. This is not to say that the Dutch language is not changing. It has in fact evolved considerably, even in recent decades (Kuitenbrouwer, 2002; J. Stroop, 2003; Verkuyl, 1998). The 20th century, for example, saw two official spelling reforms. Dutch of today is as different from the Dutch of the 17th century as is American English from the speech of Shakespeare. But it is erroneous to assume, first of all, that such changes are unusual, and secondly, that these changes are due primarily to the present dominance of English. As van der Horst (1995: 74) says, ‘The fact that Dutch changes so vigorously may yet be seen as proof that it is so alive. For let us not forget that our language changed much in earlier eras. We can see that clearly from our perspective now. If there were no such changes in our era, then there would be reason for concern’ (my translation).

Conclusion While Dutch is not a major world language, it does rank at around 60th on the world language list
a significantly high ranking, if the generally assumed total of all the world’s languages at 6000 is to be

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trusted. Also, more and more students are studying Dutch in over 250 academic programmes in Dutch worldwide. The Dutch Language Union (Nederlandse Taalunie) makes notable efforts to promote Dutch language study outside of the Low Countries, granting generous financial support for this pursuit. So Dutch and Flemish taxpayers indeed do support promoting their own mother tongue
even if a favourite posture of the Dutch is to feign surprise that one would want to learn their language (Burger, 1998). Like speakers of any language and representatives of any culture, the Dutch too are flattered when a foreigner has taken the time and effort to learn their language. Regardless of how well the Dutch communicate in English, every foreign language pedagogue and every traveller knows that, in the Low Countries, a person who speaks some Dutch is better off than one who does not. Concern about the influence of English on the Dutch language will likely continue to be expressed in the Netherlands. Anglicisms do arise and pepper the Dutch language, but assimilation of loan words is a normal process and a sign of the vitality of a language
a fact buttressing the confidence of linguists, such as van der Horst (1997), that Dutch persists today as a solid and vibrant language. Like living organisms, languages are anything but static; they are ever changing, ever mutating. In fact, Dutch appears to have an extraordinary capacity to assimilate vocabulary, a characteristic that helps to explain the exceptional magnitude of the Dictionary of the Dutch Language (Woordenboek der Nederlandsche taal), which is now the world’s largest. The completion, in 1998, of this 40-volume dictionary (45,805 pages) made lexicographic publication history. Like the Low Countries, which welcome the constant inflow of Europe’s rivers on the one hand, and live with the ever present waters of the sea on the other, so does the Netherlandic mother tongue accept linguistic incursions from the outside and use them to its own enrichment and advantage. Note 1. This paper has its origin in a lecture I delivered in 1999 upon my inauguration into the Calvin College Queen Juliana Chair of the Language and Culture of the Netherlands (De Vries, 2000). While I have substantially revised the original text and have added material in consideration of recent literature, the piece maintains some of the tone of a spoken text delivered to a general audience.

Chapter 5

Hungarian: Trends and Determinants of English Borrowing in a Market Economy Newcomer ´ N STURCZ ZSUZSANNA GOMBOS-SZIKLAINE´ and ZOLTA with JUDITH ROSENHOUSE and ROTEM KOWNER

English loan words are more omnipresent in present-day Hungarian than ever before. Whatever TV channel you switch on, whatever newspaper you read in Hungarian, you will inevitably come across an increasingly large number of terms and phrases rooted, in a variety of ways, in British/American English. This phenomenon is so obvious that not only have linguists dealt with it in the last decade, but journalists have also devoted many articles to examining its repercussions on Hungarian society and culture. No wonder, then, that articles regarding the role of English in Hungary and elsewhere, such as ‘English the universal language of the net’ or ‘Why English is the actual lingua franca’, are an everyday occurrence (Kontra, 1998). This chapter deals with Hungarian (Magyar), for long the largest nonIndo-European language spoken in Europe, and therefore a traditional source of fascination for Western linguists. This said, a few words of caution about its current status seem necessary, to clarify the territorial limits of our investigation. Hungarian is spoken today by about 13 million native speakers, of which close to 10 million live in the Republic of Hungary. About two million speakers live in territories that were part of the Kingdom of Hungary before 1918. The largest Hungarian-speaking minority, of about 1.4 million, is found in Romania, and smaller ethnic and linguistic communities live in Serbia, Croatia, Ukraine, Slovakia, Austria and Slovenia. While the linguistic developments in dominant Hungary penetrate in various forms into the linguistic satellite communities beyond its national border, there are certain linguistic differences between Hungary and other Hungarian-speaking communities, especially in 82

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regard to linguistic borrowing. For this reason, the present chapter focuses on the borrowing of English lexicon in Hungary alone. As vocabulary is the most flexible component of any language, we concentrate here first on lexical items and indicate the most frequent cases of English lexical borrowings in the Hungarian language and explain the need for them where possible. Next we explore some peculiarities of borrowings in the Hungarian context, and specifically focus on the trends and features of the Anglo-American linguistic influence on everyday Hungarian speech, and point out the adoption of such words in Hungarian. A secondary goal of this chapter is to investigate certain assumptions about universal trends concerning this subject, and point out peculiarities of our language in the context of universal trends. Finally, consideration of the so-called ‘minor languages’ in the European Union is one of the important goals of the Action Plan Promoting Language Learning and Cultural Diversity (Action Plan 2004
2006, Commission of the European Communities for the Protection of Language and Cultural Diversity). As such, our survey may contribute some data for this purpose as well, and is expected to suggest topics for projects on less widely taught languages (Eurobarometer, 2001). The main body of the material used in this study was collected from numerous written newspapers, as well as other media channels, including commercial ads broadcast over the Internet, the TV and the radio, and material collected from the speech of university students and other young people.

History of Hungarian Contacts with Foreign Languages and English Until the 20th century Hungarians had very limited contact with the English-speaking world. The Magyar tribes who spoke a Finno-Ugric language migrated to the Pannonian plain in the late 9th century, and established their kingdom in the year 1000. At that time they began to use Latin script instead of what is known now as ‘Rova´s’, the old Hungarian script. Speaking a language genetically remote from the neighbouring Germanic-, Latin- and Slav-based languages, the Hungarians nonetheless kept their original language up to the present. By 1526, however, the Ottomans gained a decisive victory over the Hungarian army and for the next 150 years ruled the region. The Turkish presence left some deep traces in the Hungarian language in the form of vocabulary of either Turkic, or even Arabic or Persian, origin. The Ottoman retreat in 1686

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marked the rise of the Habsburg kings of Austria and dominance of German culture and language in Hungary for the next 250 years. Eventually, in 1867, Hungary became a theoretically equal half of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but the German language retained its dominance at least until 1918, as the main source for vocabulary in the fields of technology and economics. As a foreign language, German was for centuries the most popular language, and even now it remains high on students’ list of foreign languages. Side by side with German, Latin remained the official language of the Kingdom of Hungary until 1844, and since its early contact with Christianity, the Hungarian language had absorbed loan words of Latin origin in the domains of religion, law, administration, politics and medicine, such as ko´d ‘code’, passzus ‘pass’, konfirma´cio´ ‘confirmation’ and diagnozis ‘diagnosis’. This trend has not ceased and may be confused with modern English loan words, as seen in recent vocabulary such as stabiliza´cio´ ‘stabilisation’, spekula´cio´ ‘speculation’, infla´cio´ ‘inflation’ and privatiza´cio´ ‘privatisation’. Borrowed foreign words, including those coming from Latin, were adapted to Hungarian by e.g. adding an epenthetic vowel to prevent word-initial consonant clusters (which does not conform to Hungarian phonology) as in Hungarian iskolaB Lat. scola ‘school’ (Menus, 2003). The history of Hungarian borrowing of English lexicon is customarily divided into six periods: 1610
1820, 1820
1849, 1850
1920, 1920
1945, 1945
1980 and 1980
present (Farkas & Kniezsa, 2002; Magay, 1992). During the first era, only a few English loan words entered Hungarian, among them the word parlament ‘parliament’. Although there are no definite testimonies about the earliest contacts with English, since the 17th century a number of English travellers documented the presence of English loan words in Hungarian. One such testimony is Edward Brown’s ‘Travels in divers parts of Europe’, which was published in London in 1687 (Magay, 1992; Orsza´gh, 1977). And yet, the impact of English loan words during this period and even as late as during the 19th century was fairly restricted. So limited was the knowledge of English at this period that prominent works of English literature reached Hungarian readers mostly with the aid of double translation, that is, via German translations. In the first period about 90 loan words penetrated Hungarian belonging to everyday life in semantic fields of clothing, eating, agriculture, building industry, shipping and sports, whereas during the second period (The Age of Reform) about 150 words were borrowed, mostly related to political, social and economic life, as well as to road and water transport and technology and the exact sciences. The

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third period witnessed a steep rise, with about 400 English loan words recorded. The fourth period saw some 180 borrowings in an era of political distancing from the English
American block (Bala´zs, 2001: 29). Two examples of loan words from English dated to the first half of the 20th century are the 1930s verb csencsel (‘change’), meaning ‘trading, exchanging things’, and nejlon (‘nylon’, with Hungarian spelling), which in the 1940s was already a frequently used word for a synthetic fibre. The period starting in 1945 reveals considerable fluctuations in English loan words borrowings, following the dramatic political and social changes which characterised these years. As Hungary fell under the aegis of the Soviet Union in 1945, the influx of English borrowing declined markedly, together with its instruction at the state schools. Since the end of the 1980s, the restrictions on linguistic borrowing have diminished and the adoption of English loan words has been renewed in an increasingly intensive manner. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the political changes of Hungary, a new sense of globalisation began to become a reality. Hungary held its first multiparty elections in 1990 and soon initiated a free market economy. Globalisation and Westernisation were facilitated by the new political environment, but also due to IT development, mobile communication, and the easy and mass accessibility to information via the web. The significant sociopolitical transformations (collapse of the Iron Curtain, transition to a market economy, mobility in all fields) accelerated Hungary’s becoming an integral part of NATO in 1999 and the European Union (EU) in 2004. As everywhere in the world, the globalised culture penetrated Hungary through several channels including the Internet, mobile telephony, printed media and broadcasting of written texts and music. In the domains of technology and business alike, English, or more precisely American English, assumed in this period the leading role in spreading information on a universal scale. Because of the opening of the country and its integration in the broader capitalist market and highly developed affluent society of Western Europe, there was greater need for vocabulary development in the 1980s, and as a result Hungarian has become inundated by expressions mainly rooted in American English. Farkas and Kniezsa (2002: 278) note that most of the borrowed words in this period were direct borrowings and many of them came through spoken English as a consequence of the advent of the radio and television (in contrast with previous periods when loan words originated in written texts). Without good knowledge of English, Hungarians began to feel that access to the globalised world had become practically impossible (Sziklaine´ Gombos, 1997). The transition to a market economy in

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Hungary necessitated the development of an adequate vocabulary (as implied by words such as profit ‘profit’ and recesszio´ ‘recession’), resulting in rapid steps taken to enrich the language in specific domains (cf. Gre´tsy & Kovalovszky, 1980 and 1985).

Attitude to English Loan Words In recent decades English has acquired the status of a leading lingua franca in Hungary. This status is expressed in the predominance of full Anglo-American forms (i.e. genuine borrowings) and the use of terminology based on Anglo-American roots in numerous languages. This process has been accelerated by the expansion of the European Union (EU), where English is undeniably the most common language of international communication for speakers of so many different mother tongues. This lingua franca type of English (or Englishes), which is neither British nor American, will soon, if it has not already, become the major second language for the EU population. In May 2004 Hungary became an EU member-state. As a result, its language policy is now determined by the European Commission Action Plan. One of the objectives of this commission in regard to language competence is that any EU citizen would speak two foreign languages besides their mother tongue. Although Hungary may face some difficulties in realising this objective, due to its linguistic background, recent attitudes to English may assist in changing old habits. A significant change in foreign language preference is not only that English has become the lingua franca of the modern world, but the area of application of the language has changed as well. As mentioned earlier, loan word adoption was necessitated almost exclusively by the demand for new vocabulary items for writing. At present the field of borrowings has expanded substantially and embraces oral forms of speech, both professional and colloquial (Bala´zs, 2002). A survey conducted in 2003 by the Hungarian National Marketing Research Institute regarding the extent to which Hungarians understand the importance of English for the future of their children shows that for 80% of the parents English is the favourite foreign language at school. This finding corresponds to figures obtained at about the same period in other European countries. That is, in other candidate countries for EU membership 87% of the parents regarded English as their favourite foreign language at school, and in EU-member countries 75% of the parents did so. The languages next in preference (after English) are German and French, apparently due to their perceived

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usefulness. Similar data were provided at the same time by the Hungarian Ministry of Education on foreign languages in public and tertiary education. In educational documents English skills are mentioned as a basic competence (together with computer literacy or driving). Without these skills it is very difficult to find employment nowadays in Hungary. Founded in 1949, The Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences also expresses interest in the current developments of the language, but does not seem to interfere with its development in general and the adoption of English loan words in particular. Research projects conducted in the Institute investigate various aspects and different variants of Hungarian in and outside Hungary including issues of language policy within the framework of European integration. The Institute operates a public counselling service on language and linguistics, which prepares expert reports on relevant affairs on demand (Minya, 2005). A most recent phenomenon in this field is the establishment of a counselling service (MANYSZI) in 2006, with the support of a Ministry of National Heritage project (Bala´zs, 2001). MANYSZI offers consultations both for institutions and the public at large in matters of language use, and organises conferences, lectures, publications and studies of the current state of Hungarian (see http:// www.e-nyelv.hu). In addition to the awaking public activity, also individual scholars seem to be concerned with the current state of Hungarian. A case in point ´ da´m Nadasdy (2001), who calls for is a short article written by Prof. A increased use of foreign words (including English) regardless of its outcomes. He lists many foreign words adopted in the past by the Hungarian, which he describes as a multilayered language. At present, he contends, the Hungarian language does not have to prove its viability and any borrowing is welcomed. The publication of such an article attests to the fact that there are voices also against profuse borrowing. But more than an opposition to borrowing, many Hungarians are simply concerned by the future of their language. A recent article which presents various types of English loan words in Hungarian, concludes correctly that ‘keeping abreast of these changes keeps linguists, lexicographers, language learners and language teachers extremely busy’ (Tennant & Tennant, 2004). From another angle, Kerte´sz (2003), who compared phonological processes of borrowings from foreign languages in Hungarian, Japanese and Russian, provides a glimpse into the various academic deliberations of English borrowings in Hungary.

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Domains of Lexical Borrowing Corresponding to universal tendencies, the Hungarian language is continuously subjected to the invasion of Anglo-American vocabulary. Planned vocabulary building based on Hungarian terms cannot follow
or does not even aspire to follow
the torrential inflow of new information on technological development, and new trends and phenomena in the fields of economy and business. Borrowings frequently achieve the status of loan words. They become integrated components of the language, with or without undergoing minor changes, but their foreign origin is mostly detectable. In the past, loan words lost the properties that marked their foreignness for their users and underwent the necessary changes required by strictly prescribed academic norms of Hungarian, the target language. The foreign origin of words
German in our case
eroded down the centuries and has become barely discernible to the native speakers of Hungarian (as also noted by Nadasdy, 2001). Nowadays, however, because of the accelerated pace of development, and the urge to name the novelties around us, adaptation of loan words does not strictly follow those expected trends or conform to those rules. Borrowing foreign terminology serves to prevent ambiguity, and in this way ensures the constant validity of the terms applied. Thus we find that the most significant domains or fields of vocabulary that import borrowings are those involved with rapid changes. These fields include technology (high-tech as well as its applications in everyday life), economy and related sciences and activities (management, marketing, finance), politics and its institutions, issues of immediate urgency for Hungary in its newly acquired EU membership status (including the environment, sustainable development, workforce mobility), the arts, culture and academic life (entertainment, music, media and life-long learning). In fact, all of these are aspects of the globalised nature of everyday life.

The Form and Limitation of Borrowing English Vocabulary Hungarian is characterised by diverse ways of adoption of borrowed words, varying from the absence of change, minimal change in form or meaning, to complex changes (cf. Farkas & Kniezsa, 2002). There are several reasons for adoption of English loan words without change (which we call ‘real’ borrowings). First, plain mental laziness (the principle known as the ‘least effort’, cf. Zipf, 1949) is assumed when no search for a proper equivalent for an English term is undertaken. This phenomenon tends to occur when there is increased pressure for

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implementation of up-to-date technologies without delay. Terms for objects and notions missing from the target language are learnt together with the acquaintance with the denoted entity. This is especially typical of the case of (proper) names of objects where a conscious decision is taken not to change them, as in the case of company names or brand names like Nokia and Adidas. The urge for vocabulary building may result in another manner of borrowing causing the formation of mixed compounds, namely component(s) of Anglo-American origin mixed with Hungarian lexical items. See: cyber-kalo´z ‘cyber-pirate’, hacker-ta´mada´s ‘hacker attack’, nonstopnonsleep o¨sszejo¨vetel ‘non-stop-nonsleep meeting’, online piacte´r ‘online market square’, spamforgalom ‘spam movement’, software ipar ‘software industry’ and show-car-kia´llı´ta´s ‘show-car exhibition’. In the borrowed component, forms with Hungarian spelling are frequently observed, such as in kiberbu¨no¨ze´s ‘cyber punishment’, kiberta´mada´s ‘cyber attack’, lı´zingce´g ‘leasing company’ and szoftveripar ‘software industry’. Loan words such as in the above examples preserve some typical features of the source language. In these cases the acquisition process of loan words/loan expressions is similar to that of learning new words in one’s mother tongue. As attested by the history of adoption of German or Latin loan words outlined earlier, the difficulty of acquiring foreign-sounding expressions does not depend on any foreign language competence of the speakers. The linguistic characteristics of Hungarian make it an unwelcoming host for lexical borrowing from English. Compared with most of its neighbours, the rules of phonetics, morphology and syntax of Hungarian, a Finno-Ugric language, are very different from those of English. Especially interesting is how the native speaker’s phonetic/morphological competence will affect the adoption, adaptation and assimilation processes. These may reveal the instances when the language is not permissive or when it is even intolerant to certain linguistic forms. A survey of linguistic interference can provide us with useful data, which may be applicable in course development for language teaching programmes for non-native speakers of Hungarian (Bala´zs, 1999). In addition to phonetic adaptation, the fast inflow of Anglo-American vocabulary has often led to uncertainty about the spelling of the words or phrases concerned. Hungarian has no diphthongs, and therefore such vowels in foreign words will undergo some phonetic alterations. This may yield several different spellings for the same word using English and Hungarian spellings, for example, file/fa´jl, franchise/frencsa´jz, feeling/ fı´ling and surf/szo¨rf. Similarly, because of the lack of the semi-vowel /w/

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in the Hungarian phonological system, the sound concerned is interpreted as /v/ for native speakers of Hungarian (as in the better known German) as in (szoftver/software). Also the word ‘manager’ has two versions (manager/menedzser) for the same reason. A recognisable stage in the transition of words from the state of borrowings to loan words has been assimilation of foreign words in sound and spelling to features of Hungarian words (e.g. fa´jl, ko´la, lı´zing, lu´zer). This is so obvious in Hungarian writing because almost all Hungarian phonemes have distinctive (single-letter) representations in writing. As letters have distinctive sound values, a condition that serves as the basic principle of reading in Hungarian, speakers will pronounce also borrowed words according to the sound values of the corresponding letters in the Hungarian alphabet. In addition to the original version and the version with Hungarian spelling, a Hungarian equivalent word may also exist as in projector, projektor, vetı´to¨. The Hungarian form might be more understandable for the larger public and can be used in written texts for explanation of the foreign word, and can be considered a translation of the two previous versions of foreign origin. As an agglutinative language, Hungarian has a highly developed morphology which operates several grammatical categories and accounts for the length of its words in general. By series of prefixes, suffixes and infixes embedded into the framework of one word, grammatical and semantic meanings are expressed. This language feature is applied also in the English loan words found in our study, as the following examples will show. Verbs of foreign origin can be admitted to the Hungarian vocabulary under the condition that a supplementary verbal suffix is inserted before the person and tense verb endings (e.g. -el or -ked): to manage
menedzsel, to babysit
be´biszittel, to lose
lu´zerkedik (slang, with semantic change, ‘behave like a loser’). After this process the verb and its derivatives behave like any regular verb of Hungarian origin and can acquire the various features of Hungarian verb morphology. See, for example, Menedzselte/he was managing it (a form in the third person singular past tense); Brainstormingoltunk, meetingeltu¨nk/we were brainstorming/having a meeting (past tense first person plural); Brainstormingola´s/brainstorming, meetingele´s/meeting, shoppingola´s/shopping, bloggola´s/blogging (verbal nouns); shoppingola´si la´z/shopping fever (in this example the adjective is derived from the verbal noun by suffixing to it the adjective suffix -i.) Nouns of foreign origin tend to obtain the features required by the morphosyntactic rules of Hungarian, such as those referring to case endings. See the following examples: Veszek egy hamburgert. Te vegye´l

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hotdogot!/I am going to buy a hamburger. (You,) Buy a hotdog. (an accusative suffix -t/-ot is attached to the noun in object function); Tala´lkozunk a meeting pointna´l./We are going to see each other at the meeting point. Here the locational suffix is added to the borrowed (English) noun and the definite article precedes the English noun compound. Online check-in van az EasyJetne´l./There is online checking at Easy-Jet. Here too the locational suffix is added to the related noun; its form is modified because of the phonological vowel harmony rules. Note, on the other hand, that the subject in this sentence does not take any suffix, as required by the Hungarian syntactic rules. Borrowings and loan words with typical morphological features of Hungarian give the speech a so-called ‘Hunglish’ character. It sounds even more Hunglish or ‘pidgin Hungarian’ when borrowings or loan words (with or without endings) occur within Hungarian structures, as in: Kickoff-meeting lesz ‘There will be a kick-off meeting/we are going to have a kick-off meeting’, Brainstorming volt ‘There was a brainstorming meeting’. The noun or noun phrase is represented by an expression of Anglo-American origin while the category of the verb is expressed by the auxiliary ‘to be’ or ‘to have’ in Hungarian in its appropriate form. The frequent combination of notion words expressed by borrowings/loan words with Hungarian verbs (as in the above examples) results in a pidgin kind of language usage, also frequent in codeswitching processes in other languages. Calques, that is, literal translations of single words or phrases, are a frequent form of borrowings widely used in terminology building as in ‘access point’  ele´re´s(i) pont, or ‘green field investment’  zo¨ldmezo¨(s) beruha´za´s. Another case of calque is observed in the term for a (computer) mouse/ege´r. Both the English ‘mouse’ and its Hungarian equivalent (the name of the animal) are used in Hungarian today. Probably because of the shortness of the expression, the metaphorical and emotional content and the humorous nature of naming this particular device, the Hungarian version is widely used as well. Somewhat different is the case of ‘tower’ toronyha´z. The Hungarian phrase explains the meaning of the expression with a somewhat expanded version (literally the Hungarian word includes two elements: ‘tower’ and ‘house’, i.e. a tower used for residential purpose). Such forms are frequent in daily usage and produce a variant for translations without any explanation. Another influence of Anglo-American terminology building in Hungarian is when translated versions of certain Anglo-American suffixes and prefixes become productive in Hungarian. Thus see: felhaszna´lo´bara´t is ‘user friendly’, and it has been followed by gyerekbara´t

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‘child friendly’, gyermekbiztos ‘childproof’. In the same way frequently used expressions may be used as prefixes. EU has become a productive prefix in EU-related terminology, similar to e-, which has acquired the rank of a productive prefix, meaning ‘electronic’: EU-adminisztra´cio´ ‘EU administration’, EU-nyugdı´jrendszer ‘EU pension arrangement’, eurobu¨rokrata ‘Euro-bureaucrat’; e-doctor/e-doktor ‘e-doctor’, e-analfabe´ta ‘e-analphabet’, e-learning ‘e-learning’, e-business ‘e-business’ and e-ko¨nyvta´r ‘e-library’. Note the aforementioned uncertainty in spelling also in these examples. Borrowings and loan words can change semantic features at different levels. Having lost their foreign nature by assimilation into the target language, words can assume new meanings, and modified meanings might follow, depending on the context. See for example the case of politika. This word in Hungarian used to have the dominant meaning of ‘politics’ (as a social science), but nowadays the expression is more and more frequently used to express the notion of an activity on the highest level of decision making. Today politika has also acquired the meaning of ‘policy’ and is a very common (generic) component of compound terms of social and economical terminology. This generic term evidently requires an attribute to make its meaning specific, for example, huma´npolitka ‘humanitarian policy’ and vezete´si politika ‘management policy’. The first meaning of politika was probably derived from the Latin origin, while the second meaning reflects the modern vocabulary imported from the American context. A final example of semantic changes due to cultural political features is represented by the word adminisztra´cio´. In the past it used to have the meaning of some back-office job. The shift in meaning to refer to government or highest decision-making body is apparently influenced by American usage of this word in the political context, as in ‘US administration’. See also stabiliza´cio´ ‘stabilisation’, spekula´cio´ ‘speculation’ etc. Hence, we may conclude that diversification in many cases is due to the fact that a very great number of words of Latin origin, already long present in the Hungarian vocabulary, have re-entered the language as loan words via Anglo-American usage.

The Context of Borrowing More than anything, English loan words represent for Hungarians a lifestyle and atmosphere of the 21st century. They reflect a mood of the generation born in the 1970s and brought up at the time of the significant changes in East and Central Europe. The older generations have to learn

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a new vocabulary while getting acquainted with new phenomena of the surrounding environment; but for today’s young adults the features of the globalised world are integrated components of their everyday lives. Language use at the workplace and at school acquires new features of slang drawing on the English vocabulary. English vocabulary is also related to higher education. The academic context of words such as Prezenta´cio´ ‘presentation’, folia ‘transparencies’, projector ‘overhead projector’ and regisztra´cio´ ‘registration’ is indisputable. Studying subjects in a foreign language while speaking the mother tongue with peers can make codeswitching quite frequent in language use in an academic environment. Student mobility programmes also contribute to this trend of language usage in student groups. Staff members of globalised companies speak a kind of workplace slang as well, e.g. riportol (he reports). The most common domain of borrowing is related to modern lifestyle, such as names of foods and drinks: hamburger, hotdog, pizza, tonik; entertainment, relaxation and related places and activities: pub, wellnesz/ wellnesss, story/sztori, hobby/hobbi; sports and hobbies, equipment: rafting, fitness, aerobic/aerobik, surfing/szo¨rf, szo¨rfo¨le´s; fashion, make-up, clothing: jeans, T-shirt, tattoo, piercing, solarium/szola´rium; trends in life: single/ szingli; popular and common professions: stylist, project manager/projekt menedzser, babysitter/be´biszitter; travel, tourism, leisure activity: last minute (utaza´s/travel (deal)), shopping, jogging. TV commercials contribute much to the creation of this image. AngloAmerican expressions transmit the feeling of a modern up-to-date society and the use of this vocabulary adds a shade of ‘state of the art’ to the content. It has also become more and more common not to translate slogans and trigger expressions of advertisements and commercials. Visual input accompanied by some verbal stimuli in English for buying, consuming and enjoying will create an effect by linking the English language predominantly with the pleasant things of life, as the English of commercials is used to transmit the sense of richness, elegance and higher living standards, such as Nokia, connecting people; Philips, makes things better; and Keep it Digital. Another major source of penetration of borrowings is through job advertisements, which often appear in the Hungarian press in English, or to a lesser extent in German. Sometimes the Hungarian equivalent is given in parallel. On the one hand, English terminology for the job description in ads is intended to avoid ambiguity, as job titles are meant to refer to exactly the same positions and assignments at different locations of multinational companies all over the world. On the other hand, the presence of a great number of advertisements for jobs in

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English in the Hungarian press suggests that English is used for the additional reason. That is, English is used as a means of attracting the reader’s attention by creating a feeling of something exclusive, rather appealing, up-to-date and international. An advertisement in English can be misleading, therefore, if the job has none of the above qualities. Similar to the phenomenon of an English-based jargon, a specific slang of the young generation can also be observed, marking the generation gap even through everyday language use. The linguistic tool by which youngsters express their preference for McDonald’s is a diminutive form, meki. Meki is so much part of this slang that it can take all the grammatical forms a Hungarian noun can have, such as a mekibe/to McDonald’s and a mekiben/at McDonald’s. Abbreviation is a frequent device in Hungarian modern vocabulary structures, and not only in borrowed words. Versions produced in this way for words in a technological context do not necessarily carry any additional emotional semantic connotations; e.g. mikro´ ‘microwave oven’. They rather correspond to the tendency of accelerating the communication process. Not only do loan words assimilate to the requirements of Hungarian, but also the imprints of variegated terminological structures based on their vocabulary are becoming detectable in the Hungarian context in general. The N1N2 structure, with no visible grammatical link to reveal the deep syntactic relationship between the two nouns (whether subject, object or other), is an accepted method in Hungarian terminology creation (e.g. taxisofo¨r ‘taxi driver’). However, the scope of this type of structure has been growing under the influence of English. The speed of modern life certainly enhances the use of compact linguistic forms. As analytical representation of semantic components of a phrase by means of long chains of successive morphological devices would affect the efficacy of communication, the application of time- and space-saving linguistic solutions is required by the demands of informatics. Thus, a mobile type of communication is spontaneously developed for achieving maximal efficiency with a minimal inventory of means in the shortest time. Accordingly, new forms are coined, such as do¨nte´shozo´ (policymaker, lit. decision making), ko¨rnyezetve´delem (environment protection) and teste´kszer (piercing, lit. body jewel). Similarly, the adjectivenoun pattern is a frequent way of terminology building. In such phrases the noun often has a general, comprehensive meaning of a system, structure or method, and its content is specified by the adjective. E.g. finanszı´roza´si rendszer (system of financing), do¨nte´si mechanizmus (decision-making mechanism).

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Mosaic Words: Abbreviations The urge for new items in the terminology of different fields results in numerous ‘mosaic’ words as well. Some are of Hungarian origin, others are borrowings. Some have undergone the typical process of borrowings to become loan words, if not fully assimilated into the inventory of Hungarian mosaic words. The formation of mosaic words is initially necessitated by the communication needed for introducing new terms and finding different compact forms for naming new notions. The application of mosaic words of foreign origin helps to meet the requirements of unification, generalisation and standardisation. The extent of mosaic word usage largely depends on the traditions of the general and terminological context of the language concerned. At the same time, mosaic word frequency is now a feature of globalisation, resulting from the effects of the media and the trends of the web. The increase in the number of mosaic words is so intense that the largest dictionaries of contemporary mosaic words of English/German contain more than a million lexical items and it seems very practical to classify them by profession under terminological headings. The items included in such lists could be considered also as abbreviations or symbols. In contemporary Hungarian the majority of these expressions are of English origin, followed by many earlier items of German origin. The examples below show what the use of mosaic words in the modern Hungarian context looks like. Such words demonstrate a mixture of English/Hungarian pronunciation. The pronunciation of the written letters is usually closer to Hungarian than to English. Thus: CIA (szı´a´je´, szı´a´´ı ), OECD (o´ece´de´, o´esze´de´, oiszidi), WHO (ve´ha´o´), PPP (pe´pe´pe´, pı´pı´pı´). This ambiguity is even more visible in morphological forms, i.e. when grammatical endings are added to these mosaic words: GPS (dzsı´pı´esz, ge´pe´esz, ge´pe´es) GPS-szel, GPS-sel (with GPS). The simultaneous usage of full names and abbreviations of institution names in the international and Hungarian forms contributes to the lack of uniformity: ECB/EKB (European Central Bank/Euro´pai Ko¨zponti Bank), GPRS (General Packet Radio Service/a´ltala´nos csomagkapcsolt szolga´ltata´s) (see Sturcz, 2005: 71). Translations of such abbreviations undoubtedly have some positive facets. In the introduction of a new idea, translating the individual components of that term can help understanding and can serve as its explanation. By understanding the components, the learner gets closer to understanding the meaning of the whole term. However, translating mosaic words and acronyms can cause confusion, especially in understanding complex and professional

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terms if the translations are not uniform, for several possible renderings (and meanings) might emerge.

Conclusions: The Scope and Limits of English Borrowing in Hungarian Hungarian is one of the languages that have been least affected by lexical borrowing from English among the 12 case studies surveyed in this volume. Borrowing from English in Hungarian is not only relatively new and somewhat limited, but at present it is mostly regarded as posing neither linguistic nor social threat to the Hungarian language and society. The limited impact of English is related historically to the scant influence of either Britain or the USA on Central Europe, Hungary in particular. It was the foreign influence of German culture and language (mostly via the Austro-Hungarian Empire under the Habsburg dynasty) that affected Hungary and Hungarian in the two centuries until 1945, and then for the subsequent four decades it was the Soviet Union that had a significant effect on Hungarian politics and culture. As such, the significant impact of English as a global and increasingly also regional lingua franca has begun here only some two decades ago. Based on our data, we found that the limited span of time since English began to affect Hungarian on a massive scale notwithstanding, English loan words are present in all the domains and usage of contemporary Hungarian. Their existence clearly reflects trends and requirements of present-day market-oriented Hungarian society. At the same time, it seems that the use of words of foreign origin has not become the privilege of any particular social group or professional circle but is common among all members of the society, even though it is more popular among the young generation. As in the past, Hungarian is open today to foreign influence, and tends to accommodate loan words by adapting them to its phonological and morphological features. Throughout the 20th century, Hungary witnessed two waves of purism, the first one in the interwar era and the second starting in the late 1940s, under Soviet influence. Present-day Hungary is in one of the most open phases, both culturally and linguistically, in its modern history. The Research Institute for Linguistics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences does not interfere with the trend of borrowing English loan words or act against it, but observes this process closely. The institute aims to study the development of the contemporary Hungarian language, and despite some pros and cons on this issue, does not object to borrowings in general or to English borrowings in particular. The

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current integration of Hungary in the EU and further afield in the global economy makes Hungarians much more inclined to regard English as their major source of linguistic borrowing rather than German, the regional lingua franca they had been relying on and borrowing from for several centuries. As such, English serves as the main source of new vocabulary related to globalisation, mass communication and cuttingedge technology. The relatively new regard for English is associated also with its becoming the primary and the most popular foreign language taught today at the Hungarian education system, replacing Russian in the Soviet era and German before 1945. This new role English has acquired in Hungary reinforces the existing tendencies to borrow from it, and as this trend began only in the late 1980s, one may predict that the influence of English may grow stronger in the coming years.

Chapter 6

Russian: From Socialist Realism to Reality Show MARIA YELENEVSKAYA

Fast decline of the Communist party authority, violent ethnic conflicts, perestroika and, finally, the disintegration of the USSR
all the social upheavals that led to the crash of the ‘last empire’ have triggered sweeping changes in the Russian language. Linguists agree that one of the most salient of these changes is the activation of foreign words and phrases, in particular those borrowed from English (see, e.g. Kolesov, 1998; Kostomarov, 1994; Nesterskaia, 1997; Shaposhnikov, 1998). And this process is not limited to new borrowings but includes rejuvenation of lexemes absorbed by Russian earlier (Krysin, 1996: 142). Material for this chapter was drawn from the media and Internet publications, and from literature in humanities and social sciences. In addition, since 1999 I have been recording Anglicisms1 in the speech of various interlocutors in Russia. I made notes about the context in which English insertions occurred and extralinguistic data that were relevant to the situations in which they occurred. Besides, my archive contains newspaper clippings with ads and cartoons, as well as photographs of the street signs, billboards and posters taken in Moscow and St. Petersburg. As data collection was not systematic and the initial criterion for selecting material for analysis was intuition of a native Russian speaker, I filtered the sample after consulting linguistic literature on language contact, bilingualism, foreign borrowings in Russian, as well as various dictionaries. The collected examples were divided into groups on the basis of the following categories: motivation for borrowing, semantic domains, semantic reanalysis and stages of integration into the language system. My primary concern was to trace the interaction of linguistic, social and cultural factors accompanying the current wave of massive borrowing from English to Russian. This seems to be of special interest in the period when post-Soviet Russian society is reassessing its position on the East
West axis. 98

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Russian Language Contacts The intensity of language contacts in Russia has a cyclic nature. Periods of extensive borrowing alternate with emphasised purism (Maximova, 2002: 197
198). Since the 18th century Russia has considered itself to be part of Europe, and in different periods of history was under the linguistic influence of various West European societies. AngloRussian language contacts can be traced to the 16th century, when the two countries established trade relations. The English words borrowed then were mercilessly mispronounced and would hardly be recognised today (Timofeeva, 1995: 10). The next massive borrowing from English occurred during the rule of Czar Peter I, at the end of the 17th to the beginning of the 18th century. It was the period when the Russian fleet was born, and the vocabulary of seafaring was taken from English and Dutch. Most Anglicisms in seafaring were used alongside their Dutch counterparts, thus forming parallel terminological systems (Maximova, 2002: 193). At the beginning of the 19th century, educated classes of Russian society became interested in English technologies, economic theories and practices, in the system of education, as well as in culture and literature.2 Borrowing in that period did not pertain to any specialised sphere, but to social life as a whole (Ward, 1986: 315). In the early 20th century, borrowing from West European languages went hand in hand with political events. After years of emigration, Russian revolutionaries brought home many foreign words and activated vocabulary of the French Revolution previously familiar only to intellectuals. Many of them reflected new social and political phenomena and moved from the periphery to the centre of the lexical system. They were repeated in speeches, flyers and in the press, and contributed to the politicisation of the general vocabulary in the period from the First Russian revolution of 1905 to the first years of Soviet power. An illustration of this can be found in the novel by Mikhail Sholokhov, Virgin Soil Upturned. One of the protagonists, Nagulnov, tried to learn English in order to get ready for the dialogue with the world proletariat. He was astonished to discover that all the words he would need to agitate for the world revolution, e.g. revolutsia, elektrifikatsia, industrializatsia,3 existed in English and did not differ much from familiar ‘Russian’ words. In the 1920s, foreign words from the domains of government and economy were among the first ones adults saw in the reading books in schools opened for the illiterate. In that period, numerous words borrowed from English came to denote new technologies, artefacts and activities.

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In the Soviet era, except for the early 1920s, the period of Khrushchev’s Thaw in the mid-1950s
mid-1960s, and the years of Perestroika, in the late 1980s, the policy of language planning was rigid and opposed influence of other languages, which were considered to be vehicles of alien ideologies (see Busse & Go¨rlach, 2002: 16; Dardano, 1986: 235
236; Farkas & Kniezsa, 2002: 280 on ideological roots of purism). Comrie et al. (1996: 25, 27) note that the closed society that characterised the Soviet period in general was reflected in the language in that the standard was codified and promoted by schooling and by the heavily censored literature; as a result, the standard language was far behind developments in spoken standard Russian. In the 1930s, the policy of language purism was often pushed to absurdity: many foreign words that were in use were rejected and replaced by native equivalents, frequently at the expense of language economy. This trend continued in the 1940s during WWII and in the postwar years during Stalin’s campaign against ‘rootless cosmopolitans’. The next outburst of struggle against foreign expansion in the language occurred in the mid-1970s. In postwar years Anglicisation became a global trend and it became increasingly difficult to prevent penetration of English words. Yet, as a fully developed language with well developed terminological systems and a vast repertoire of functional styles, Russian could service every sphere of communication (Kryuchkova, 2001: 405
406). This, and the closed nature of Soviet society, allowed the Russian language to be self-sufficient. But with the growing longing of the Soviet urban population for the Western way of life and latent opposition to the official ideology, the desire to learn English was growing. The use of English idioms was fashionable in underground publishing, samizdat (self-publishing), and in songs circulating on tapes, magnitizdat (publishing on magnetic tapes). Above all, Anglicisms were used in private conversations of the Soviet intelligentsia expressing discontent with the regime, and known as ‘kitchen conversations’. Foreign words were also widely used in the student slang and in the jargon of big cities (Ermakova, 1996: 32).

Language Contacts since the Glasnost The policy of Glasnost launched by Gorbachev and subsequent attempts of post-Soviet Russia to enter the community of developed nations created favourable conditions for closer contacts with the West. Political changes influenced the language too, and made it much more amenable to the influence of English.

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Russians acquired a taste for travelling, both on business and for pleasure. Many people started looking for seasonal jobs abroad or entered a new lucrative business called ‘shuttling’: they would go to China, Turkey, etc. to buy cheap consumer goods and then sell them at home. In well-to-do families it became fashionable to send children to study in private schools and colleges in the West. The new social phenomena did not take long to convince the urban population that proficiency in English could open new opportunities in work and leisure. This gave an unprecedented boost to learning English as a second language. Interspersing speech with English words again became a marker of prestige. Foreign imports increased, thus introducing the Russian public to Western consumer goods. New products entered the market under original names, e.g. various gadgets and house technologies: fotokity, pleery, blendery for photo-kits, players and blenders; cosmetics
sprei, conditsionery, pilingi for sprays, conditioners, peeling-creams; articles of clothing: legginsy, kardigany, slaksy, for leggings, cardigans and slacks. New foods conquered the market, and for a short time Russians became enthusiasts of American-style fast food, devouring gamburgery, cheeseburgery and khot-dogi (hamburgers, cheeseburgers and hot-dogs). New developments in politics, and in particular the emergence of a multiparty system and election campaigns, flooded the country. Here too, Western style was imitated and required the introduction of new concepts and new words: elektorat, impichment, inoguratsia, votirovat’, lobbirovat’, (electorate, impeachment, inauguration, to vote, to lobby), etc. Not all of these are native English words, yet in the 1990s they were borrowed from English. Just as in the first decades of the 20th century, laymen became passionately involved in political activities, and neopolitical terminology started moving from the periphery to the centre of the lexical system. Economic reforms and privatisation of state property made Russian citizens willing or reluctant participants in these processes and introduced an abundance of economic and business terms into the lexis: retsessia, defolt, depozit, tender, holdingi, bondy, vauchery (recession, default, deposit, tender, holdings, bonds, vouchers), and so on. Various economic and social processes, such as privatisation, expansion of service and entertainment industries, triggered new employment opportunities, hence the emergence and wide use of such words as distribiuter, marketolog, surveier, rielter, broker, diler, sikiuriti, (distributor, marketing expert, surveyor, real-estate agent, broker, dealer, security-guard). Some of the English names of occupations, such as farmer, manager, businessman

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and producer, had entered the Russian language much earlier, but were previously used primarily with reference to life in the West. Like other Anglicisms, they acquired pejorative connotations in the Soviet times, particularly when applied to the local life and people. During Perestroika the process of de-ideologisation of the society began and was reflected in the language. Many words lost their negative ideological connotations or even reversed them. The process of re-connotation of the vocabulary (see RyazanovaClarke & Wade, 1999: 91) involved not only the words directly related to politics and ideology but also to economy, people’s occupations, clothes, foods, etc. A case in point is the shift observed in the nouns biznes and biznesmen (business and businessman), which were used to describe illegal or dishonest commerce in the Soviet period. Today ‘business’ has become one of the most prestigious occupations, although pejorative components of meaning have not disappeared. They have been redirected and express envy and hatred for the new bourgeoisie, the so-called ‘new Russians’. Another example illustrating the acquisition of value sememes in foreign words is fermer (farmer). The native word krestiane (peasants) was almost completely ousted in the Soviet times by the stump compound kolkhozniki (members of a collective farm). Due to the deterioration of the kolkhoz system in the last decades of Soviet power, this word came to be associated with inefficiency and dated agricultural methods. The borrowed noun fermer and its derivatives fermerstvo (farming) and feremerizatsia (farm development) became widespread in the 1990s and imply the use of advanced agricultural techniques, private ownership and even cost-effectiveness. The spread of information technologies (IT) contributed to the increase in the number of loan words from English. The computer terminology is predominantly English, and a lot of buzz words associated with online activities and the lifestyle of the young have entered everyday speech and youth slang: virtual’nyi mir (virtual world), chatit’sia (from ‘to chat’, to participate in an online discussion forum), khaknut’ (from ‘to hack’, to break into a computer system), etc. An interesting phenomenon has been observed by Ryazanova-Clarke and Wade (1999: 119). From the 1960s to the 1980s, English was the primary source of innovation in the Russian youth slang. In the 1990s, however, the saturation of the language with English words made slang develop counter to the general stratum and mainly draw on native resources. While in the past English helped to create a subcultural code inaccessible to the general public in the 1990s, it could no longer isolate one subculture from another. Yet, some of the Anglicisms have stayed in this register and produced a variety of

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derivatives. For example, the noun ‘flat’ first integrated into the youth slang without modification, later developed into fletukha
apartment (the suffix ukha adds pejorative connotations); fletiara
big apartment; fleter
the owner of an apartment; fletovskii
of, belonging to or connected to home (Levikova, 2003).

Motivation for Borrowing The main reasons for borrowing are the same irrespective of place and time (see, e.g. Comrie et al., 1996; Krysin, 1996; Ryazanova-Clarke & Wade, 1999). All of them can be observed in contemporary Russian and can be summarised as four distinct cases: the need to name new concepts, activities, social phenomena and products; the need to differentiate semantically close concepts; language economy; and sociopsychological factors. According to Polivanov (1968), the rate of shifts in languages is closely associated with social upheavals. This was the case with the Russian language in the first decade after the October revolution of 1917 and in the first post-Soviet decade. Virtually all the Russian linguists analysing recent foreign borrowings agree that most of them appeared to reflect new phenomena of Russian life. They also agree on the domains that proved to be most active in absorbing foreign lexis, although classifications differ, as some of the words are attributed to different categories by different authors. One explanation is that most of these words are first introduced into speech by journalists who use them in different contexts and thus the domains of use frequently overlap (Sabol’ch, 2003: 560). For example, iappi (yuppie) belongs to the domains of economy and society, fitnes-tsentr (fitness centre) to sports and entertainment, nou-hau (know-how) to technology and politics and fentezi (fantasy) to literature and entertainment. The current process of new word acquisition is dynamic, and some new words imported from English are intensely used in the media but have a short life-span (Maximova, 2002: 1999). Besides integrating separate words, contemporary Russian has borrowed intensively from developed terminological systems, when entire fields of knowledge, culture or technology became accessible to the language community. A case in point is Information Technologies (IT), whose English terminology quickly penetrated professional slang of programmers and electrical engineers and then spread among rank-andfile computer users. Similar examples are massive borrowings in the fields of economics and commerce that were needed to reflect realities

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that had not existed in the USSR. The vast majority of these terms, however, are mostly used by professionals and journalists specialising in economic surveys but remain poorly understood by the lay public. By contrast, the emergence of Western-type show business that replaced state organised mass culture of the Soviet times is popularised by the mass media and made its terminology widely accessible. Today many newly borrowed English words coexist with native words or old loan words from English and other languages, for example, spektakl’-shou (show), obraz-imidz (image), pol’zovatel’-iuzer (user), makiazh-meikap (make-up), podtiazhka-lifting (cosmetic surgery), afisha-poster (poster) and so on (see other examples in Maximova, 2002: 199). It is still difficult to say which of the competitors will remain in use. The language does not like semantic doublets, but they can survive either as stylistic variants or in different functional niches. Drastic changes in social conditions, such as the departure of a formerly dominant sociopolitical elite, may result in the disappearance of the innovative form; under other circumstances, if only one competitor survives, it is most likely to be the new one (Krysin, 2000: 40; Thomason, 1997: 186
187). Differentiation of semantically close concepts is observed both in the centre and on the periphery of the lexical system. As native and semantically close foreign words do not only diverge in meaning but appear in different contexts, their combinatorial properties also differ. Here are some examples: The generic drug and the feminine form podruga have been replaced by a boifrend (boyfriend) and g’olfrend (girlfriend) when a romantic relationship is implied. Another pair is ubiitsa
killer, in which the latter stands for a professional killer. The borrowing and fast integration of this word were triggered by the exponential increase in organised crime. While the native noun has no derivatives, the borrowed one has developed a feminine form killersha and compounds telekiller, antikiller (tele-killer, anti-killer), and noun phrases, such as informatsionnyi killer (information killer, referring to a journalist releasing information that can ruin careers and even lives). Differentiation of semantically close concepts is a salient feature of scientific terminology. In the following examples, the native word in each pair is neutral while the borrowed one is used in specific contexts of the corresponding discipline/s: nabludenie
monitoring (natural sciences, medicine, social sciences) spad
retsessia (slump, recession, decrease
recession, economics) pol
gender (sex, gender
gender, social sciences)

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Sometimes, a new borrowing appears side by side with the word it has replaced (the underlined words mark the native equivalents of the foreign word): S ekranov ushli kartiny v zhanre ekshn
firmennoe bludo Gollivuda. Mezhdu tem, na liubom festivale imenno fil’my deistvia’’ (. . .) obespechivaiut interes pressy, burnuiu svetskuiu zhizn’ i proch. Movies of the action type, the Hollywood specialty, have almost disappeared from the screen. Yet it is the movies of action (. . .) that attract the press, trigger animated high life, etc. (Argumenty i Fakty (AiF), #7, 2002) Vam nuzhno kupit’ maechku-topik You have to buy a little T-shirt-top. (Sputnik Novosti, #34, 2002) Sometimes the meanings of the native and borrowed words are juxtaposed: ‘Politicheskikh sub’ektov deliat na tri kategorii
‘narod’, ‘elektorat’ i ‘grazhdane’. Political discourse distinguishes three types of subjects: the ‘‘people’, ‘electorate’, and ‘citizens’. (AiF, #35, 2003) Among the English words introduced for the sake of language economy, we can distinguish two subgroups. Words in the first group denote new concepts that could be rendered in Russian by descriptive paraphrases (some also using foreign words): klipmeiker (clipmaker)
tot, kto delaiet klipy allarmizm (alarmism)
tendentsia k rasprostraneniu trevozhnykh nastroeniy imidzhmeiker (imagemaker)
tot, kto sozdaet obraz [politika] Words belonging to the second group replace native phrases that were in use but remained on the periphery of the lexical system: vstrecha v verkhah 0summit (summit) uchastnik oprosa/perepisi 0 respondent (respondent) vkladyvat’ den’gi 0investirovat’ (invest) Because of the novelty of foreign words and instability of their use, language economy is not achieved in actual texts as authors either use both the native and the borrowed word together (see examples above) or feel they have to translate or explain unfamiliar words. This metatext

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breaks the automatic flow of speech: the writer mobilises language reflexivity and concentrates on the form of the utterance and on the means of expression (see Krysin, 2004: 199). Some of these comments are neutral: to est’, ili, chto oznachaet (that is, or, which means); others reveal the author’s attitudes that range from being apologetic and self-ironic about the use of an alien word: poprostu govoria, a po-Russki, kak teper’ priniato govorit’ (simply speaking, as we say in Russian, as it is customary to say today), to ridiculing it: Master diplomatii i fandreizinga (po-prostomu dobyvania sredstv) T. v liubykh kontaktakh besprepiatstven i azarten. A master of diplomacy and fundraising (simply speaking obtaining funds), T. sees no obstacles in finding contacts and does it with fervour. (Moskovskie Novosti (MN), 3 September 2004) The frequency of such comments in the discourse makes metalanguage activities of contemporary Russian speakers a distinctive feature of the period. Analyses of these commentaries show that they perpetuate the dichotomy of we versus the other and give another proof of the heterogeneity if not polarity of values and social orientation of contemporary Russian speakers (Vepreva, 2003: 21). The major sociopsychological factors that trigger introduction of English words are communicative significance of concepts they denote and the prestige of English. Some examples of this phenomenon were mentioned in the previous section. Additional ones include the native word podrostok, almost completely ousted by a tineidger (teenager), tseliteli, which turned into hilery (healers), izbirateli replaced by the elektorat (electorate), and so on. In many cases previously absorbed and nativised words from various West European languages, including English, are being replaced by new borrowings from English: zhargon
sleng (jargon
slang); sort
brend (brand); kegel’ban
bouling (bowling); bal’zam
konditsioner (conditioner), etc. An important indicator of the prestige of English words is obvious in their use in the names of businesses and in advertising. Here are some examples that appear on the streets of St. Petersburg: Stomatologia: Smail (Dental clinic: Smile); Insaid: Agentstvo nedvizhimosti (Inside: Real-estate agency); Iuridicheskaia firma: Edvaizer (Law firm: Adviser); Muzhskaia odezhda: Mister I (Men’s clothes: Mister I). Note that these businesses operate on the domestic market and offer services to local customers.

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Lexicosemantic Processes Related to Borrowing Foreign words are seldom integrated into a language without changes in meaning. The most important feature of contact is that it involves at least two languages, and irrespective of the area of study, languages in contact must be analysed as languages in contrast (Ivir, 1991: 237). The semantic re-analysis that occurs in the process of borrowing and innovations of old borrowings can be divided into four groups: narrowing of meaning, expansion of meaning, semantic redistribution and indirect borrowing, also known as calques or loan translation. The narrowing of meaning in newly borrowed words is widespread in my sample. Polysemantic words are first used in one meaning only while the other meanings are rendered by native words or older nativised borrowings. Here are some examples indicating the number of meanings each word has in English and quoting the one in which it is used in Russian: organaizer (organiser, 6 meanings4)
a personal organiser broker (broker, 6 meanings)
a stockbroker brend (brand, 10 meanings)
a brand-name fentezy (fantasy, 13 meanings)
the name of a genre in literature and film Note that in some cases (e.g. organaiser, broker, brend) a component of the original compound word is dropped in Russian. Moreover, the remaining component can become a part of a newly formed compound in which it is combined either with a native or an old loan word: . . . seichas zapadnye kompanii-brendy primenaiut te zhe samye komponenty, kotorye dostupny i riadovomu moskovskomu sborschiku. . . . Western companies-brands use the same components that are available to a rank-and-file Muscovite assembling computers. (Izvestia, 15.09.2000) The meaning is also narrowed when newly borrowed words acquire specific connotations nonexistent in the native equivalents or old loan words. A magazin (shop), for example, sells any goods, a shop, on the other hand, presupposes only high quality goods. An obraz (image) is neutral and can be good or repulsive; by contrast, an imidz (image), is associated with attractiveness and glamour. Even the names of occupations, such as rieltor, diler, distribiuter (realtor, dealer, distributor) have an aura of prestige in Russian which they do not have in English. Moreover, they have a euphemistic function as compared to the words they have

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replaced: kvartirnyi makler, torgovetz valutami, agent po prodazhe (see similar examples in Kolesov, 1998: 229
230; Shaposhnikov, 1998: 145). This phenomenon is often observed in commerce. In the following example the original meaning of the borrowed noun clashes with the new one and with the adjective that modifies it. The result is the creation of an oxymoron, as in the name of a shabby store in St. Petersburg: Elitnyi sekond hend: kachestvennaia odezhda iz Evropy Elitist second hand: quality clothes from Europe In the first sections of the chapter we have already given examples of redistribution of meaning. New semantic components can replace older ones or supplement and expand the existing meaning of loan words, thus although it is a qualitative phenomenon, it is often combined with a quantitative change. Expansion of meaning does not happen immediately after a new foreign word appears in the target language. Some borrowings first covering only one segment of the semantics of the source word later acquire additional meanings. Meaning expansion may be consistent with the semantics of the source word or deviate from the original. In my sample the most obvious reasons for the latter are fashion and inadequate understanding of new words. For example, sponsor was first used in the meaning of a ‘person or company financing a building project, a movie or play production, or publication of a book’. Today it denotes anyone ready to give money to another person or organisation for whatever purpose, including a man supporting his mistress. Meaning expansion can be connected to a shift of domain. Thus the word kasting (casting) first appeared in the vocabulary of show business, but later expanded its meaning to ‘choosing a candidate among applicants for any job’. Note that in the passage quoted below ‘casting’ and another recent borrowing ‘piercing’ are used to create a humorous effect implying the similarity between contemporary Russian politics and show business: Esli bez pirsinga v sovremennoi zhizni esche kak-to oboitis’ mozhno, to bez kastinga*uzhe nikak. Dlia tekh, kto esche ne znaet: kasting eto podbor kandidatur (s pirsingom ili bez nego) na razlichnye rabochie mesta. K primeru, letom 1999 goda v Kremle sostoialsia kasting na mesto Prezidenta Rossii, kotoryi uspeshno proshel Putin. It is difficult to do without piercing today and one can hardly survive without casting. If you don’t know yet, casting is selection of appropriate candidates (with piercing or without it) for various jobs. For example, in the summer of 1999, the Kremlin held casting for the

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position of the Russian president which was passed successfully by Putin. (MN, #30, 6
12 August 2002) Another example of expansion is the word ‘remake’, which has become so fashionable that it is applied not only to new movie and play productions, but also to an altered version of any story, picture or recurrence of events and trends. Rassuzhdenia o ‘tretiei mirovoi voine’ okazyvaiutsia remeikom ofitsial’noi versii o mezhdunarodnom terrorizme Deliberations about ‘World War III’ appear to be a remake of an official version about international terrorism. (MN, 10
16 September 2004) Indirect borrowings, or calques, which form new words or phraseological units by means of literal translation, often emerge as the reaction of the speech community to a sharp increase in the number of direct borrowings (Iartseva, 1998: 211). In my sample there are a few morphological calques from English, for example, pol’zovatel’ (user), stsenarii (scenario), piramida (financial pyramid) and prozrachnyi (transparent). In fact, most of these are difficult to distinguish from semantic extensions, a phenomenon frequently observed in calques. Thus the old loan noun stsenarii was until recently used only in the meaning ‘script’, pyramida in four meanings equivalent to the meanings of its English equivalent, all of which had a common sememe specifying the geometric shape, but it was not associated with commerce. Similarly, the adjective prozrachnyi (transparent) was used in the meanings stemming from the physical property of transmitting light through a substance. It had the metaphorical meaning of ‘obvious, not concealed’, but in this meaning was used only in one phraseological unit: prozrachnyi namek (a clear hint). Today prozrachnyi is frequently used in the metaphorical meaning and appears in collocations with the nouns ‘upravlenie’ (transparent management), granitsa (transparent boarder) and metody (transparent methods), etc. Most of the other calques in my sample are phraseological units: sotovyi telefon (cellular phone), torgovaia marka (trade mark), myl’naia opera (soap opera), etnicheskaia chistka (ethnic cleansing), vysokii sezon (high season), dvoinoi standart (double standard), zhivaia muzyka (live music), etc. Some of the calques coexist with the loan words, and form semantic doublets, for example, khai tek (high tech)
vysokie tekhnologii, had disk (hard disk)
zhestkii disk. The phrase vsemirnaia pautina ‘worldwide web’ appears seldom, but as a component ‘web’ is used in compound nouns in

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combination with a native word or an old loan word, for instance, vebstranitsa (web page) or veb resursy (web resources). The phrase otmyvanie deneg (money laundering) has produced another innovation, used informally, otmyval’schik (launderer). Similarly, in the programmers’ professional slang materinskaia plata (motherboard) has been reduced to mamka, diminutive and slightly pejorative for ‘mother’. Calques are often used to produce stylistic effects. Po dannym epidemiologov, krys v Moskve obitaet ne menee 10 mln. osobei, a kolichestvo myshei v ‘vysokii sezon’, to est’, letom i oseniu priblizhaetsia k 50 millionam. According to the data provided by epidemiologists, at least 10 million rats reside in Moscow, and the number of mice in ‘high season’, that is, in summer and fall, approaches 50 million. (AiF, #24, 1999) The article criticising inefficiency of sanitary services mockingly uses the phrase ‘high season’ familiar from commercials of tourist businesses. In the context of the passage the calque implies that Moscow has turned into a resort for pests.

Stages of Integration Foreign words integrated into a borrowing language can be divided into three categories: occasional insertions, barbarisms or exoticisms, and loan words (Kolesov, 1998: 227
231; Krysin, 2004: 59
64; RyazanovaClarke & Wade, 1999: 151). Occasional insertions tend to form numerous subcategories in the analysed sample. Like exoticisms, they remain morphologically indivisible in the target language (Krysin, 2004: 59). They cannot be found in dictionaries or lexicographical publications, and their appearance in the text is triggered by the theme of the utterance, individual mannerisms or the author’s desire for the utterance to attract the reader’s/listener’s attention. Another distinctive feature of occasional insertions is that they often appear in the script of the source language. The majority of these in my sample are names of companies and products, both imported and domestic. In the latter case, the motivation for choosing an English name is two-fold: high prestige of English and desire to conquer foreign markets using transparent names. Pervyi ezhegodnyi open-air festival’ elektronnoi muzyki CASTLE DANCE (ICE EDITION) The first annual open-air festival of electronic music CASTLE DANCE (ICE EDITION) (Vechernii Peterburg, 7 July 2005)

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Novinka: Be cool, uveren i svoboden. Novyi antiperspirant Cool Spray ot Gilette A new product: Be cool, self-confident, and free. A new antiperspirant Cool Spray produced by Gilette. (an ad in St. Petersburg subway) Both of the cited examples include more than one insertion using English words in the Latin script. In the advertising of a music festival the modifier ‘open-air’ is used instead of its Russian equivalent pod otkrytym nebom in addition to the name of the festival. In the second example, the authors of a commercial use a new foreign word, antiperspirant, instead of the previously integrated deodorant. The name of the product and its manufacturer, as well as the appeal to ‘be cool’, are given in the Latin script and are highlighted by the use of a different font. Even if only a negligible part of the readers appreciates the pun created by the interaction of two different meanings of ‘cool’, the authors of the text seek to attract the public by the prestige of English words. The Latin script is also used to highlight English phraseological units inserted in the text as in the following examples: V Pkheniane, v svoiu ochered’ v etoi situatsii mogut deistvovat’ po printsipu ‘to use or to lose’. Pyongyang, in its turn, may act according to the principle ‘to use or to lose’. (Nezavisimaia Gazeta, 1 March 2005) S 11 utra i do 11 vechera prodolzhalsia prazdnik zhivoi muzyki non-stop The festival of live music lasted non-stop from 11 in the morning to 11 at night. (Metro, Sankt-Peterburg, 8 July 2005) Unlike occasional insertions, which often function as individual mannerisms, exoticisms are repeatedly used in various texts but remain unstable in pronunciation, spelling and number. Likewise, words in the intermediate stage between exoticisms and loan words share the same features of instability. Thus the word ‘remake’ appears as remeik and rimeik; ‘distributor’ as distribiuter and distributor; ‘racketeer’ as reketir, reketior and reketmen; ‘off-shore’ [companies] as offshornyi and ofshornyi; ‘shopping’ as shopping and shoping (Shaposhnikov, 1998: 38; Timofeeva, 1995: 81
99). In addition, there is no uniformity in the spelling of compound nouns, which are alternately spelt as hyphenated words or as one word: bisineswumen (businesswoman) but biznes-ledi (business-lady), teleshou and tele-shou (tele-show), fitnes-tsentr and fitnestsentr (fitness centre), boifrend and boi-frend (boyfriend), sekond-hend and sekondhend (secondhand) and so on.

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In newly adopted nouns there is no instability in gender. The agreement of new words, inanimate nouns, is usually based on the analogy of the last syllable of the word to the ending typical of masculine, feminine or neuter form of native equivalents. On some occasions a new word inherits the gender of the Russian word it replaces: . . . avtor rassmatrivaiet svoiu rabotu kak nekoe keis-stadi . . . (the author considers her investigation to be some kind of a case study). In this example ‘case study’ is neuter like the Russian noun issledovanie which would be used to translate it. The agreement of animate nouns is guided by the context, but in most cases they function as masculine forms which are chosen for generic use in contemporary Russian. Thus, auditor (auditor), baiker (biker), prodiuser (producer), spichraiter (speechwriter), imidgmeiker (image-maker), rieltor (realtor) and sponsor are all masculine. In many newly adopted words we can observe instability of singular
plural forms. Thus the nouns sikiurity (security), pablisiti (publicity), nou-hau (knowhow) and kopirait (copyright) appear as singular and as plural forms: Oni ispolosovali parniu plecho i nogu, i neschastnogo sikiuriti prishlos’ gospitolizirovat’ (. . .) Prichem feis-kontrol’ sikiuriti osuschestvlaiut iskluchitel’no po vneshnim priznakam They shredded the guy’s shoulder and leg, and the poor security was to be hospitalised. (. . .) Notably, security carry out face control only judging the [customers’] appearances. (Moskovskii Komsomolets (MK), 27 June 2001: 1) Another sign of the instability is that English words borrowed in the plural form sometimes appear without a Russian inflexion marking the plural and sometimes with it. As a result, in some words the category of plurality is marked twice: leginsy (leggings), fiutchersy (futures), sekondtaimerzy (second-timers) and so on. Finally, English nouns that are not yet fully integrated and nativised appear only in the nominative case and do not agree with other nouns and adjectives in the case and/or number. The process of integration of newly borrowed Russian words is multistage. First a new word is phonetically adapted. As Thomason (2001: 72) remarks, phonological adaptation is typical even in casual contact situations. In fact, in most cases these adaptations follow the same pattern as pronunciation mistakes of Russian speakers. Ultimately, new words enter the system of conjugation and declension and come to be perceived as native. It has been observed that the abundance of affixes and inflexions simplifies the task of nativising

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foreign words (see, e.g. Kostomarov, 1994: 116). And although adaptation of foreign words is a gradual process, the majority of the nouns borrowed in the last two decades are derivable (Krysin, 2004: 53), primarily along these patterns: noun0noun reket0reketir (racket0racketeer) skeitbord 0skeitbordist (skateboard0skateboard-rider) promoushn 0 promouter (promotion 0promoter) noun0adjective reiting0reitingovyi (rating 0having high rating, popular) glamur 0glamurnyi (glamour0glamorous) promoushn 0 promouterskii (promotion 0promoting) noun0verb lobbi 0lobbirovat’ (lobby 0to lobby) sponsor0 (pro)sponsirovat’ (sponsor 0 to sponsor) parking0 (za)parkovat’, (pri) parkovat’sia (parking lot 0 to park) (Prefixes marking perfective forms are given in parentheses.) It has been observed that in various languages nouns are on top of the list of borrowed words. The reason for this is lexical
semantic, rather than grammatical and structural: the items for which new designations are needed are primarily indicated by nouns (Weinreich, 1967: 37). Russian is no exception. At the next stage of integration nouns of other categories are formed (e.g. device 0process; occupation0 person engaged in it; an object, tool 0 a person using it, etc.). Among derivatives, adjectives are numerous but adverbs are few. Finally, nouns belonging to various categories derive verbs differing in aspect and supplied with prefixes to distinguish imperfective and perfective forms (see examples above). In some cases reflexive forms of the verb are created with the help of the corresponding suffix: parkovat’sia (to park), chatit’sia (to chat). In the last decade a new pattern can be observed among borrowings from English: adjective 0 noun ekskluzivnyi 0 ekskliuziv (exclusive, elitist0products, goods and services accessible to the few, extraordinary events) intensivnyi 0 intensiv (intensive 0intensive work, intensive courses) criminal’nyi 0kriminal (criminal0 criminal behaviour, the rule of criminal groups, members of criminal groups) extremal’nyi 0ekstrim (extraordinary, dangerous (about situations, conditions) 0 risky enterprise, adventure)

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In these and similar cases the Russian adjectival suffix is dropped and the newly coined nouns become almost identical to the corresponding adjectives in English. The adjectives that serve as the source of innovation are loan words previously integrated into the language. The phenomenon observed here can be viewed as back derivation, an indirect effect of language contact triggered by an earlier direct importation. Although these later changes are motivated by internal pressures within the language, they would be less likely to occur if the initial contactinduced change had not happened (Thomason, 2001: 62). While results of direct importation remained on the periphery and were seldom used in speech, the newly derived nouns are currently fashionable and appear in the speech of journalists and lay persons alike: Vy by esche predlozhili zapisyvat’ svoi ekstrimy v dnevnik i chitat’ na son griaduschii This would be like suggesting I should keep a diary of everything extraordinary happening to me and read it before falling asleep. (AiF, #34, 2003) The process of derivation, as well as the emergence of expressive and metaphoric components of meaning, and the use of foreign words in unusual contexts testifies to their integration into the recipient language (see, e.g. Krysin, 2004: 200). Some of the English borrowings of the last decade are used with diminutive and endearing suffixes that connote small size, pleasant appearance and cuteness: displeichiki (displays), beidgiki (badges), smailiki (smileys), miski (plural for Miss). In the last example the diminutive form creates a humorous effect because it forms a homophone with the native noun miska/i (bowl/s). Endearing and diminutive suffixes can be added to acronyms: pisiushka (for PC), esemeska (for SMS), sidiushka (for CD). In my sample pejorative suffixes are rare and mostly come from youth and programmers’ slang: pisiuk (for PC), mamka (for mother board) and sidiushnik (for CD player). The Russian language has a high percentage of words with value sememes (Novikova, 1995: 79), and the addition of these to the words that are value-neutral in the source language is another sign of their integrating into the target language. Among the best examples of fully integrated borrowings of the last decade is the abbreviation ‘PR’, for ‘public relations’. First it was used in the Latin script, in inverted commas and was supplied with translation or explanation of the meaning (see, Leichik, 2002). Later it turned into an acronym piar with inflections of a masculine noun. The process of

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derivation produced additional nouns: piarschik, piarovets (a person engaged in PR). Compound nouns were formed: piar-aktsia (promotion event), samopiar (self-advertising). The adjective piarovskii modifies such nouns as ‘activity’, ‘efforts’, and the verb is used in the imperfective form piarit’ (advertise) and in the perfective form with the appropriate prefixes: otpiarit’, propiarit’. Phonological and morphological adaptation has been followed by semantic expansion. In Russian piar can be used as a value-free noun but it has also acquired value sememes that are often emphasised. While in English the goal of public relations is to promote goodwill between various parties, such as a company and customers, the government and an individual, etc., Russian piar sometimes implies the opposite
defaming others. In this case the modifier chernyi (black), which has strong negative connotations in the Russian culture, is used: Chernyi i belyi piar Black and White PR (headline, Mir Novostei, No. 35, 2003) Kak nam otPIARit’ Rodinu? How can we Improve the Image of our Motherland? (headline, AiF, #27, 2002) Militsiu propiarili. Po-Chernomu The militia got a blaze of publicity. It was negative, it was black. (headline, AiF, No. 27, 2003) Finally, speaking about integration of new borrowings from English it is necessary to mention word play in which members of the Russian speech community replace the alien word with the native word on the basis of their phonetic or graphic similarity. This is a long tradition of urban speech habits. For example, stipendia (stipend) has been long called stepka (the diminutive of the male name Stepan). The spread of computer culture turned the program ICQ into As’ka (diminutive of the female name Asia), and an Internet home page is called homiak (hamster). E-mail is commonly referred to as Iemelia (diminutive of the male name Iemelian seldom used today but familiar to everyone as the name of the protagonist of a popular fairy-tale) or mylo (soap); DVD is transformed into dovedi (to lead (to), to take (to) to accompany (to)), while shareware turns into sharovary (baggy trousers) and share into shar’ (to grope about) (these and more examples in Kapanadze, 2001; Leichik, 2002; Shumov, 2003; Trofimova, 2002). The abbreviation CD is used as a newspaper rubric SiDelka (nurse), devoted to new recordings by popular musicians,

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and so on. In fact, the richest reservoir of such innovations can be found in the hackers’ slang from which it penetrates the speech of other groups. Another popular technique of word play with loan words is substituting a native morpheme or its part for a foreign one. In the first post-Soviet years during privatisation that was perceived by the lay public as stealing national riches by the powerful and greedy, the old loan noun privatizatzia and its newly formed derivative privatizatory (people in charge of privatisation) were transformed into prikhvatizatsia and prikhvatizatory derived from prikhvatit’ (to seize up, to take illegally); the old loan word demokraty that also moved from the periphery of the lexical system to the centre was transformed into der’mokraty, in which the Greek morpheme demo was replaced by der’mo (shit) and into demokrady in which the second morpheme borrowed from Greek kraty was replaced by the native krady (thieves in compound nouns) (see these examples in Shaposhnikov, 1998: 99). Similar puns are used in informal and media discourse. Their comic effect is achieved by paronymy of the borrowed and native words, and their stylistic effect is particularly strong when the native words are taboos (see Leichik, 2002: 42
43). In the press such puns often have a strong position in the text and appear in headlines: DLT kak zerkalo prikhvatizatsii DLT [a department store in St. Petersburg] as the mirror of grab-andgo privatisation. (Literaturnaia Gazeta, 24
30 May 2005) Puns in which English morphemes are integrated into Russian words are widely used in advertising. Two quoted below could be found on posters in many public places of St. Petersburg in summer 2005: Dzins delaiet KHOT. V KHOTiaschie $000. IsKHOTiaschie $003 Jeans is acting HOT. Incoming calls are $000. Outgoing calls are $003. Kvas
ne kola, pei Nikolu. Kvas
is not Cola, drink Nikola. Advertisers of the mobile telephone company ‘Jeans’ use the sound similarity of the native root khod (going) and the English ‘hot’ in the words iskhodiaschie (outgoing) and vkhodiaschie (incoming). In the second example above, producers of the national soft drink kvas, whose brand name is the Slavic name Nikola, appeal to the consumer by boldly opposing their own product to the international giant’s popular drink, and the aesthetic pleasure derived from the rhymed pun is part of their persuasive strategy. The communicative value of advertising, which

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will not be fully effective unless adequately understood by potential customers, depends on the familiarity of the public with the English words incorporated into puns.

Attitudes Towards Intensive Borrowings in the Society Russian linguists observe that throughout history, the overall attitude of Russian society to massive borrowings from other languages has been negative. In the period of social change there may be a connection between people’s attitudes to new social phenomena and innovations in the language. The young, who are often the driving force of political and social reforms, are more willing to accept penetration of new concepts and words than people of advanced age. Today, urban dwellers and people from the centre have more contacts with American culture than those who live in villages and on the periphery, so they are more tolerant of the expansion of Americanisms. Krysin (2004) observes that the higher the level of education, the faster the language adaptation; moreover, people in humanities dealing with culture professionally are more tolerant of foreign borrowings than others (Krysin, 2004: 201). Today journalists are the pioneers of new vocabulary in Russia. In the Soviet times mass media were considered to be a vehicle of speech education. In the late 1980s Krysin (1989: 88) asserted: ‘the language of the mass media greatly influences the speech of the people; while contributing to the spread of normative and literary usage it filters dialectal elements, common parlance and other socially limited speech variations’. Today the standard speech of the Soviet period is being reappraised. Overloaded with ideological cliche´s, verbal red-tape and mannerisms of the country’s leaders, it was often stifling and repelling to members of the speech community. Since perestroika the influence of mass media on the public has increased. Their language has changed dramatically: it has become more personalised, more dialogical, more stylistically dynamic and more open to changes in naming. Journalists tend to combine stylistically contrasting elements and use metaphors and metonymies more generously than in the past (Panov, 1988: 23). A new phenomenon in Russian journalism is codemixing, many examples of which have been given in this chapter. The weakening of censorship and autocensorship also lifted the ban on the free use of common parlance and slang (Zemskaia, 1997). All these factors proved favourable for the expansion of Anglicisms in the media. In contemporary Russia, this phenomenon is perceived by some as a political and ideological defeat of the country, its surrender to Western culture and lifestyle. Excessive use

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of foreign words in public speech was repeatedly on the agenda of the Russian Parliament, State Duma. After lengthy discussions, during the third hearing it approved the bill ‘On the Russian Language as the State Language of the Russian Federation’. One of its clauses was devoted to ‘language culture and the culture of verbal communication’ (compare this with the French legislative efforts in Humbley, 2002: 111). The document put limitations on the use of common parlance, scornful and swearwords and expressions on the occasions when Russian is used as a state language. It also restricted the use of foreign words if appropriate Russian equivalents existed (http://www.vesti.ru/news.html?id  25367&tid12288, 15 February 2003). This bill was criticised and shelved. Ironically, as if to prove the unrealistic nature of proposed regulations, parliamentary, scholarly and Internet discussions of the bill abounded in loan words and recent borrowings. Global expansion of the English language and the interaction of Russian and American cultures are a frequent theme of newspaper and TV discussions. Thus the central TV channel RTR-Planeta repeatedly showed an issue of the prime-time weekend programme Cultural Revolution that was entitled, ‘Do we have to know English?’ The two panellists were the controversial politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky, and Prof. Yuri Viazemsky, an expert in world literatures. Zhirinovsky’s thesis was: the world has to learn Russian; we don’t have to humiliate ourselves by suffering from a foreign language. Moreover, he claimed that if post-Soviet politicians had not used the loan words ‘revolution’, ‘communism’ and ‘default’, but the native bunt (revolt), obzhinnoe obschezhitie (communal life) and obval (landslide), no political disasters would have happened in the country. His opponent Viazemsky maintained that among the talents of the Russians (he referred to Russian speakers at large) was the ability to learn and internalise new material quickly. The only way to make it known to the world is to explain it to everyone in English (which is not English, but American, or rather world language). Despite the notoriety and obvious absurdity of Zhirinovsky’s claims, he was supported by a substantial part of the audience in the studio. It has already been mentioned that insertion of new borrowings is often accompanied by the metatext in which speakers reflect about the meanings of new words and compare them to the native words and concepts. Grassroots control hampers the integration of foreign words and concepts that remain vague and alien to the speakers. The most effective way of doing it is mockery, and see (above) how derision functions with words used in political discourse.

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Among the linguists positions differ concerning the spread of borrowings from English, but many are concerned about the ‘excess of alien words and concepts’ jeopardising the ecology of the language. Notably, in one of the most authoritative Russian dictionaries the word varvarism (barbarism) is defined as a ‘word from a foreign language or an expression built according to a pattern of a foreign language that violates the purity of speech’ [italics by the author] (Ozhegov, 1983: 63). Critical remarks against the expansion of Anglicisms/Americanisms in contemporary Russian that appear in linguistic literature (see, e.g. Kolesov, 1998; Kostomarov, 1994; Novikova, 1995; Savelieva, 2000) can be summarised as follows: . The number of exoticisms that have not been digested by the language community is constantly increasing. They reflect the current language fashion to make speech too bookish and elaborate and cause information emptiness. Unclear to a vast majority of the speakers, exoticisms are frequently misused. Despite the publication of new dictionaries of foreign words, many borrowings remain unmapped. Experiments conducted in various towns testify to the growing number of agnonyms and a drastic drop in speech culture even among professionals and students (see Cherniak, 2000; Sirotinina et al., 1998). . Many foreign borrowings are no more than doublets of the native Russian words. As a result, there is redundancy in naming objects and phenomena, which violates onomaseological development of the language (from object to semantics). . Exoticisms oust native words and concepts and endanger the Russian ethnocultural landscape. Borrowing of English words has paved the way to the expansion of American culture shaped by an alien mentality. Intergenerational ties secured by the continuity of words and images are disintegrating, and the national language may lose its folk basis. Anxiety about the current state of the Russian language and appeals to deal with the language on the state level (see Kolesov, 1998: 228) are countered by other linguists who believe that rapid changes occurring in the language are natural in periods of social change (Tsivian, 2002: 471) and are signs of health and robustness of Russian. Skliarevskaia (1996: 463), for example, argues that it would be reasonable to speak about qualitative changes in the language if the language system transformed such features as the nature and means of semantic development, wordbuilding, the principles of stylistic stratification, and ability to borrow

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and adapt alien elements. The intensity of the processes witnessed in the Russian language today testifies to the opposite: the language system has not lost its potency but shows vitality and coherence. Notes 1. To classify words as Anglicisms I used Go¨rlach’s (2003: 1) definition: ‘An Anglicism is a word or idiom that is recognisably English in its form (spelling, pronunciation, morphology, or at least one of the three), but is accepted as an item in the vocabulary of the receptor language’. In Russian linguistic literature today, the term Americanisms is more frequently used, as language borrowings are seen as a part of American cultural expansion. 2. Infatuation with everything English among the enlightened part of the aristocracy, however, could hardly compete with the influence of the French language and culture in that period. 3. To render Russian words and proper names, the US Library of Congress transliteration system has been used. 4. Here and below I am listing the number of meanings cited in Webster’s Universal College Dictionary, 1997.

Chapter 7

Hebrew: Borrowing Ideology and Pragmatic Aspects in a Modern(ised) Language JUDITH ROSENHOUSE and HAYA FISHERMAN

Wherever languages come into contact, their speakers borrow various items from one another (Weinreich, 1953/1967). Bilingual speakers, at any level, use words from different languages within the context of the dominant language. Borrowing words from a language different from one’s mother tongue is a universal phenomenon of human communication and is related to codeswitching on the one hand and relexification on the other. Different semantic areas within the general vocabulary of a language reveal this effect at variegated levels (for references see, e.g. Bhatia & Ritchie, 2004). Interlanguage contact (in many languages) is a social and cultural process often addressed by sociolinguists such as Fishman et al. (1977b), Haugen (1972), Higa (1979) and Maurais (1985). Three types of countries have been described regarding the contact between national languages and the common communication language 1.

2.

3.

Countries characterised by competing local cultures and languages that adopt the common communication language as a compromise. An example is India, where the struggle between Hindu, Urdu and Bengali led to the embracing of English as the language of the government and the social elite. Countries with ethnic subdivisions and problems regarding political unity, and lacking a national governmental tradition, where a common communication language is adopted as a symbol of national unity (‘nationism’, according to Fishman). Countries with a tradition of national language, in which a common communication language is adopted for certain functions to 121

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122

integrate political, economic and social modernisation (‘nationalism’: see, e.g. Fishman, 1971; Fishman et al., 1977b). The purpose of the present chapter is to study some features of the English borrowings in Modern Hebrew at the beginning of the 21st century and the effect of English on Hebrew through borrowed vocabulary. This investigation may give some idea of the scope of loan words and their relative distribution in various types of written journalese style which reflects the everyday intermediate Hebrew. We begin with a brief survey of the history and background of lexical borrowing processes in Hebrew and focus on borrowings from English. The study of borrowed words in recently published sample texts from newspaper articles in Hebrew is described, analysed and compared with previous studies. Linguistic literature distinguishes foreign words from borrowed words in the language,1 but we do not discuss this issue in this chapter. Clearly, borrowed words in Hebrew do not come only from English. The etymological origin of many borrowings, in Hebrew and in many other languages, is often Greek or Latin. Sometimes it is therefore difficult to define the exact origin of foreign words in Hebrew. Borrowings often involve translation (calques) and transfer of either or both semantic and syntactic elements from the source language. Borrowed items may have diverse forms: single words, phrases, collocations, idioms and whole ‘formulas.’ The process has been noted already in the general literature as well as the literature on Modern Hebrew (Alloni-Fainberg, 1977; Nir, 1989; Shlesinger, 2000). Our present work is limited to single words, but we also comment on words used in loan translations.

Historical and Linguistic Background Although Hebrew is often described as having been revived after a long period of death, it is known to have been used as a holy language for liturgical purposes, as well as for secular literature, including poetry, during about two millenia of Diaspora. For Jews it remained a second or foreign language (see Horvath & Wexler, 1997), while local languages were used for daily communication with local (not necessarily Jewish) speakers. This diglossic situation is somewhat similar to the condition of Latin in the Middle Ages. However, Hebrew has regained the status of a mother tongue, while Latin, like other extinct languages, died with the death of the last native speaker. Since about the 18th century movements for the revival of Hebrew began advocating the learning of Hebrew out of ideological motivation.

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They wrote belles lettres in modern (Western) genres and journalistic publications for adults and for children.2 At the end of the 19th century this activity reached ‘Palestine’, then part of the Ottoman Empire. By the beginning of the 20th century not only adults could write and speak Hebrew, but also children,3 who learnt it from siblings, friends, teachers and parents (Bar-Adon, 1988; Glinert, 1991). This process led to the development of Contemporary or Modern Hebrew as a full-fledged spoken and written mother tongue. There was dire need to adapt the language to daily use, as the vocabulary of Biblical or Medieval Hebrew alone did not suffice for daily communication. The Hebrew Language Committee, established in Jerusalem in 1908, undertook the task of coining, innovating and disseminating new terminology for the necessary objects and notions. Also after the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 this committee, renamed in 1953 the Hebrew Language Academy, still continues this activity and many of the present-day words of Modern Hebrew have been coined by linguists, educators, writers, poets, journalists and members of the Hebrew language Academy.4 But word borrowing is usually a spontaneous process, not directed by any language policy, and thus even the Hebrew Language Academy sometimes affirms borrowed words that have already integrated in Hebrew (Language Academy, 1992). The lexical innovations coined by the Hebrew Language Academy are disseminated in various ways, including mass media (radio, TV and journals), written publications and dictionaries. For example, for about 45 years the Office of Technological and Scientific Terminology of the Academy5 published more than 80 dictionaries of technical or scientific terms, of which about 50
60% have been absorbed into daily use over the years.6 Simultaneously, many other terms were absorbed in Hebrew from foreign languages, and were used even by Academy members who supported the innovation of Hebrew words.7 At the beginning of the 20th century, the borrowed terminology in Hebrew originated in important culture-languages in Europe
mainly Russian, Polish, French, Spanish, German and Yiddish (Fisherman, 1986; Garbell, 1930; Glinert, 1991), as their speakers in Palestine knew them from their countries of origin. The British Empire had interests in the Eastern Mediterranean in the 19th century and even earlier (Lewis, 1960). But British English reached the area only with the beginning of British Mandatory rule in 1920, after the British conquest of Palestine at the end of World War II. The British Mandate lasted until 1948, when the newly established state of Israel

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took over. During those three decades English was the main official language of the country, with Hebrew and Arabic as additional official languages. In that period many borrowed words (such as ginger, puncture, jeep, winker, ax (in a car) and file) entered Colloquial Hebrew rather than normative newly coined Hebrew words, but only a few have survived to the present. When the British left the country the English language ceased to be an official language (Fisherman, 1972). Thus, later, penetration of English into Hebrew comes from a different source. After World War II American English rapidly spread all over the world as a result of the US role in the war and its economic and political power. With its mass media communication (radio and movies) and its material and cultural products, American English relatively quickly replaced the role of British English in Israel. This influence has been growing since the 1960s, especially following the Six Day War in 1967 (see Bendavid, 1974: chapter 4), so that most of the loan words in Hebrew in the last three or four decades have come from this language.8 This trend is attributed to the prestige of American English compared with other immigrant languages, and is similar to the situation elsewhere (cf. Auer, 1999; Kova´cs, 2001). Schwarzwald (2001) assumes that the rate of borrowed words that have integrated in Hebrew is more than 10%, for the borrowing process in Hebrew has been going on throughout its history. A 20th-century example is that the Dictionary of Foreign Words in Hebrew (Pines, 1955) has 12,000 entries, whereas the Expanded Dictionary (Pines & Pines, 1976
77) has some 24,000 entries. This number has greatly risen in the last 30 years: Rosenthal’s (2005) slang dictionary already contains about 10,000 items drawn from English. The status of borrowed words has also strengthened and numerous dictionaries insert such words among their entries (including the new edition of the prestigious Even-Shoshan monolingual Hebrew dictionary).

Public Awareness of Loan Words in Hebrew and Attitudes to Them Public awareness of borrowing depends on the speakers’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Native speakers do not usually consider this issue and use their language without questioning it, as an inherent part of their life. In many language communities, those who care for the state of a native language, its development and future are mainly language professionals such as linguists, language teachers, educators and writers of all genres of literature. This holds for Modern Hebrew too. The first

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large-scale Hebrew slang dictionary (by Ben-Amotz & Ben-Yehuda, 1972, 1982) reflects awareness of the mixed state of the language and the happy acceptance of its unsupervised development.9 The academic literature, along with public debates in journals and daily newspapers, is exceedingly rich in discussions of the Hebrew language, particularly its future (for summaries of this literature see, e.g. Fisherman, 1986, 2001; Muchnik, 1994a, 1994b, 2003). Expressions such as ‘Modern Hellenisation’, ‘Engrew’ and ‘Hebrish’ (cf. ‘franglais’) reflecting attitudes to borrowings are not uncommon in this literature. A recent example of such discussions is Goldberg’s (2002) article about ‘high-tech language’, the mixed Hebrew
English language spoken by hi-tech employees, especially in the areas of electronics and computers. This article was one of the articles about the Hebrew language that appeared in the Ha’aretz Independence Day supplement. Like so many writers who discuss the present situation of Hebrew, Goldberg (2002) mentions several reasons for the use of English in this population. These reasons include the English language skills of this population, who are actively connected with colleagues abroad, mainly in the USA; a ‘snobbish’ and ‘elite’ feeling of these workers; and the need for English terminology due to its absence from Hebrew. Thus, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic aspects combine with ‘objective’ linguistic features of Modern Hebrew (Nir, 1989, 1993). Fisherman (1990) studied the attitudes of three groups of Hebrew speakers
school students, nurses and university students
to foreign words in Hebrew and loan word use. Differences and discrepancies between theory and practice were found in these groups, related to age, home background, language background and employment. These participants showed relatively little objection to the use of foreign words, although the actual rate of use of such words was lower than their expressed support rate. The public attitude to Hebrew as a national value in Israel has been changing since about the 1980s. Before the establishment of Israel, and for roughly the first three decades after its establishment, the ideology and general attitude to Hebrew revolved around the slogan ‘Hebrew [person]
speak Hebrew [language]’. By now this motto is nearly forgotten, and private and official establishments are more open to the preservation and use of newcomers’ mother tongues
mainly the tongue of newcomers from the former Soviet Union. Many shop signs and media advertisements are written also, or only, in foreign alphabets (even with spelling mistakes).10 On billboards, ads for cultural entities such as theatres, journals, orchestras and nightclubs are often written in Russian,

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Globally Speaking

alongside Hebrew. In addition, the writing and titles on foodstuff packaging are often in Hebrew and Russian instead of Hebrew and English (cf. Shur, 1999; Spolski & Shohamy, 1999). Some researchers fear that the effect of English will change the nature of the national language. Others think that Israel, formerly a multilingual country due to the numerous immigrants’ languages, has recently become bilingual, with English being the most dominant foreign language. The fact that at least half the Israeli population is bilingual definitely affects the development of Hebrew. Rosenthal, for example, argues that what worries the debaters is not the question . . . whether this is good or bad . . . but whether Hebrew can die out. The Hebrew language is still a unifying force for the parts of Israeli society. If this society decomposes and dies out from the inside, a scenario which looks very remote right now, the orthodox Jews will resort to talking Yiddish, the Russians will talk Russian and the secular Israelis will move to English. On the other hand . . . Hebrew exists and is alive, but not always must you invent a word in a language instead of something nice that the Gentiles have given us. (Goldberg, 2002) Another newspaper article (Tsemah, 2004) discusses various syntactic and semantic changes in Modern Hebrew mainly due to loan translations (calques) from English. Thus, public awareness of the state of Hebrew is expressed mainly in the educated classes in discussions dealing with ideological (normative) aspects, the future of this language, its ongoing development and specific linguistic topics (e.g. Kantor, 1994; Ravid, 1994).

Features of Borrowed Vocabulary in Hebrew The morphological classification of vocabulary traditionally refers to nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs (e.g. Schwarzwald, 2001). As in other languages, loan words in Hebrew, including words borrowed from English, involve more nouns than any other part of speech (Fisherman, 1986, 1994; Ravid, 1994). Borrowed words may have morphological and/ or phonological foreign features (Nir, 1989, 1993), which affect their absorption in the new environment (Fisherman, 1986; Ravid, 1994). Such features, for example, are phonemes that do not exist in the ‘original’ Hebrew system, such as ˇc, ˘g, w in ‘chief, jeep, winner’, diphthongs such as [ou] in [sou] ‘so’, or phoneme clusters making heavy syllable structures, especially in the end of a word, such as in [bank] ‘bank’, and [humanist] ‘humanitarian’. It should be noted that word-final

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127

clusters with the sonorants /l,m,n,r/ are often resolved in speech by an added vowel, e.g. ‘Lincoln’
[Linkolen], and film
[filim]. Fisherman (1986) notes concerning her sample that the innovated Hebrew parallel was often written next to the borrowed foreign word. Muchnik (1994a) suggests several explanations for this phenomenon, such as subconscious linguistic redundancy; sensing foreignness in the borrowed word (especially adjectives); the personal wish to explain a foreign word by a Hebrew one (if the foreign word comes first), or a patronising assumption that the reader might not know the meaning of the foreign word. In this context it has often been noted (for other languages) that semantic differences may evolve between the borrowed word and its parallel in the receiving language, whether an innovation or a translation. For example, in the pair /sotsiali/ (Bsocial) versus /’evrati/ (social, in Hebrew), the first means ‘social work’ and the latter ‘belonging to a society or community’ (Blanc, 1989: 90); see also /moral/ (Bmorale) versus /morali/ (adjective referring to morals, ethics). Thus, certain loan words become part and parcel of the vocabulary of Modern Hebrew and cannot be replaced by Hebrew innovations. Word borrowing is usually a spontaneous process, not directed by any language policy and the Language Academy sometimes indeed affirms borrowed words that have already integrated in Hebrew. The integration of borrowed words apparently involves three processes (not necessarily in any chronological order): first, straightforward borrowing (without changes); second, modification of the phonological form to adapt it to the phonological system of the receiving language; and third, morphological modification by adding or modifying morphemes (e.g. feminine or plural of a noun or a verb derived from the consonantal stem of the word; more about this in Fisherman, 1986). Examples are /zapping/
/mezapzep/ (singular masculine present tense verb form, with geminated ‘root consonants’), /sponserit/, ‘a female sponsor’ (a feminine singular suffix at the end of the English word) and /kasetot/ ‘cassettes’ (with the feminine plural suffix at the end of the borrowing). Shlesinger’s (2000) study of Hebrew journalese also referred to foreign borrowings in it. He found that different genres borrow at different rates: the less formal or academic the style (e.g. gossip sections), the more borrowings are used in the text. Identifying a loan word as originating from British or American English is possible not only due to linguistic but also to extralinguistic factors, such as the type of object or notion it refers to (e.g. scientific, technological, fashion) or the date this object or notion was first

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produced. Here this kind of semantic classification is not dealt with, however.

Case Studies The following sections present our study of the effect of English on Hebrew as revealed in recent journalese writing, the intermediate register of written Hebrew. Journalese vocabulary and style, like any text, vary by topic and register (politics, science, sports, economy or literary supplements) and by ‘genre’ (e.g. short news, articles and advertisements) (Rosenfeld, 2003; Shlesinger, 2000). We therefore examined a number of articles in genres that appeared to us likely to reflect different areas of English influence. The research questions for the studies described below concern the rate and kind of English elements in Hebrew, in what fields they are found, and the manner and nature of their blending with Hebrew journalese. Material The material of this research is mainly based on the three largest daily newspapers in Israel, Ma‘ariv, Ha’aretz and Yedi‘ot Aharonot. From Ma‘ariv we scanned 35 issues over a three-month period (March
May 2003).11 From Ha’aretz we scanned news briefs (22 March 2003), two supplementary brochures ‘Shammenet’ (‘cream’) and ‘Captain Internet’, the supplement for Internet news (26 March 2002). We also scanned the festive issue for Passover (March 2002). From Yedi‘ot Aharonot we scanned the news briefs and the ‘Good Times’ supplement issued on the same day (21.3.02). Finally, we scanned the local news section in the Haifa local weekly Kol-bo (March 2002). This material is comprised of advertisements, news and general political articles. On the whole, this array presents a variety of journalese text styles which reflect the medial communication level of Modern Hebrew.

Method All the entries of the Ma‘ariv corpus were studied for morphological classification of the Hebraised adjective forms, frequency of occurrence of each adjective, and the semantic domains of all the borrowed nouns. In addition, we made a linguistic analysis of loan translations found in the Ma‘ariv corpus. We then compared the findings with those of previous studies (Fisherman, 1986, 1994). In the material from Ha’aretz, Yedi‘ot Aharonot and Kol-bo only the non‘Standard European’ words were analysed. We counted only words that

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129

had specific semantic meanings originating in British or American English (even if they were also ‘Standard European’ words). We also divided the borrowed words into British and American groups. Although it is sometimes difficult to define the source language of the borrowed words, this sample gives an idea of the scope of English borrowings in Modern Hebrew at the beginning of the 21st century and their relative distribution in journalese.

Findings Entries, distribution and occurrence rates Ma‘ariv provided 612 entry patterns of foreign words of which 404 (65%) were nouns and 208 (35%) were adjectives. Out of the 404 nouns, 192 (48%) were identified as originating in English. The adjectives were adapted to Hebrew by means of the nisba ending, namely ‘i’ suffixed to the foreign base.12 As in Fisherman (1986), approximately the same relation between nouns and adjectives was found in this sample: nouns in 1986 constituted 61% of the borrowed words (1986), now 65%; adjectives were then 39%, now 35%. (For example, in the new corpus, 12 of the 20 items occurring ten times or more were adjectives. Among the 71 words that occurred 6
9 times, 42 were adjectives.) However, nouns borrowed from English showed a marked numerical difference: in the 1986 study, 28% of them were from English, whereas the figure in the present corpus is almost double, 48%. The corpus from Ha’aretz, Yedi‘ot Aharonot and Kol-Bo amounted to about 200 types (450 tokens) of borrowed words from English, that is, a higher relative rate of borrowings than in the larger Ma‘ariv corpus. As in the Ma‘ariv corpus, in this sample most of the borrowings were nouns, but the ratios were very different. Nouns here amounted to 86.7% of the occurrences, whereas only 13% were adjectives and other speech parts. This finding seems to reflect the different journalistic genres. Another cross-section refers to the distribution of specific nouns versus adjectives (in tokens). Of the 208 adjectives in the Ma‘ariv corpus, 37 (18%) appear at a high frequency (5 times and more). On the other hand, among the 183 words with a small occurrence rate (1
5 times), 119 are nouns and 62 are adjectives (see Figure 7.1). From another angle, 60% of the high-frequency words (6 times and above) are adjectives, whereas only 40% of the nouns have a frequency of six times or more. It appears, then, that adjectives of foreign origin are used more often than borrowed nouns, whereas the absolute number of the borrowed nouns is larger.

Globally Speaking

130 5–7

8–10

11–15

20+

1. Objective

1. Optimistic

1. Aggressive

1. Relevant

2. Alternative

2. Automatic

2. Dominant

3. Anonymous

3. Attractive

3.Dramatic

4. Authentic

4. Intimate

4. Massive

5. Intellectual

5. intensive

6. Ethnic

6. Strategic

7. Drastic

7. Effective

8. humanitarian

8. Global

9. Virtual

9. Digital

10. Tragic

10. Legitimate

11. Logistic

11. Standard

12. Minimal

12. Specific

13. Maximal

13. Collective

14. Pessimistic

14. Critical

15. Correct 16. Conventional 17. Rational 18. Theoretic

Figure 7.1 Hebrew adjectives with various frequencies of occurrence (five times and higher) (back-translated into English)

It should be noted that Modern Hebrew adjectives have become an independent category and a strong source for lexical enrichment of the Hebrew vocabulary through derivation (cf. Ravid & Shlezinger, 1987). This trend is in contrast with Biblical Hebrew, where the verb and noun classes are dominant, rather than adjectives. ‘Foreign’ adjectives are claimed to create a stronger sense of foreignness than nouns. According to Mirkin (1975), writers who use these foreign words demonstrate over-erudition. Nir (1993) maintains that the profuse usage of foreign adjectives is often due to a lexical deficiency, accompanied by a desire to be stylish, as well as some snobbishness. In addition, borrowed nouns become obsolete with time and are replaced by new ones, whereas adjectives show a stronger tendency to survive over time. The picture given by the borrowings in Ha’aretz, Yedi‘ot Aharonot and Kolbo is completely different, as noted. Loan words in these newspapers are mainly nouns and include only a tiny number of

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131

adjectives. This difference can be probably explained by the different genres of texts examined in these newspapers. American and English product names and toponames are especially numerous in this part of the sample. Advertisements in particular abound in foreign proper names, which are usually not translated into Hebrew. As expected, the number of loan words referring to American culture items that have penetrated Hebrew is large in articles that discuss topics related to the USA, for example, catering, volume, super (Bsupermarket), ‘sea food market’, suite (/swita/ in Hebrew, a luxurious living accommodation), concept (/kon’sept/ in Hebrew), baby-sitting (/beibisiting/ in Hebrew), jazz (music style), rock (dance type), etc. In the Ma‘ariv sample, approximately 60% of the words borrowed from English are from the entertainment, communication and socioeconomic fields (43% of the 60% entries pertaining to folklore and society are from the field of entertainment and communication). Twenty percent of the words borrowed from English are from the technological domain; 10% are from the political and security domains; and 10% are from the fashion domain. Figures 7.2, 7.3 and 7.4 present some of the items from this newspaper. A picture of the findings in the samples from Ha’aretz, Yedi‘ot Aharonot and Kolbo can be obtained in three other figures. Figure 7.5 is a detailed summary of the data and Figure 7.6 presents the total number of types of English borrowings in Hebrew in this sample. Finally, Figure 7.7 gives the classification of 205 types (of 450 tokens) of borrowed nouns, adjectives, verbs and other word types in the various newspapers (except Ma‘ariv). 1. Audition

11. D.J

21. Talk-Show

31. Cinemateque

41. Cocktail

2. Eighties

12. Date

22. Tenor

32. Small Talk

42. Club

3. Item

13. Disk

23. Trans

33. Special

43. Close-Up

4. Effect

14. Discotheque

24. Media

34. Spin

44. Come-Back

5. Action

15. Disk

25. Medium

35. Pub

45. Country-Club

6. Blind-Date

16. Drink

26. Sound

36. Play-Boy

46. Rating

7. Gimmick

17. Happy-End

27. Statist

37. Prime

47. Record

8. Jingle

18. Happening

28. Stand-Up

38. Chat

48. Show

9. General

19. Winner

29. Stand-Upist

39. Comics

Rehearsal 10. Double

(Stand-Up Comedian) 20. Ton

30. Striptease

40. Confidence

Figure 7.2 List of borrowings from the entertainment and communication domains

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132

Banking and

Way of life and Security and

Money

Social Life

Politics

Technology

Fashion

1. Overdraft

1. Out

1. Act

1. Egzos (< exhaust)

1. Old-fashion

2. Upgrade

2. Outsider

2. Bunker

2. Internet

2. Elegant

3. Bonus

3. Aids

3. Deadline

3. E-Mail

3. Jeans

4. Boss

4. In

4. Terror

4. Astronaut

4. Vest

5. Business

5. Integrity

5. Trigger

5. Blender

5. Touch

6. Bar

6. After (After-

6. Lobby

6. Breaks

6. Tissue

7. T-Shirt

duty break) 7. Broker

7. Baby-sitter

7. Lynch

7. Jack

8. Barman

8. Jungle

8. Sticker

8. Video

8. Look

9. Job

9. Jogging

9. Session

9. Visher

9. Lipstick

10. Deal

10. Junk-Food

10. Patriot

10. Wax

10. Mini

11. Dealer

11. Duplex

11. Panel

11. Toaster

11. Maxi

(Windshield Wiper)

12. Hacker

12. Homosexual 12. Partner

12. Tuner

12. Model

13. Hi-Tech

13. Homeless

13. Primaries

13. Timing

13. Style

14. Tip

14. Hamburger

14. Cabinet

14. Tape

14. Stylish

15. Trade-In

15. Well-Done

15. Concept

15. Tipex (