Globally Speaking Motives for Adopting English Vocabulary in Other Languages

by Rosenhouse , Judith; Kowner, Rotem

• ISBN13: 9781847690517
• ISBN10: 1847690513
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-05-22
• Publisher: Multilingual Matters

Summary

This volume accounts for the motives for contemporary lexical borrowing from English, using a comparative approach and a broad cross-cultural perspective. It investigates the processes involved in the penetration of English vocabulary into new environments and the extent of their integration into twelve languages representing several language families, including Icelandic, Dutch, French, Russian, Hungarian, Hebrew, Arabic, Amharic, Persian, Japanese, Taiwan Chinese, and several languages spoken in southern India. Some of these languages are studied here in the context of borrowing for the first time ever. All in all, this volume suggests that the English lexical 'invasion', as it is often referred to, is a natural and inevitable process. It is driven by psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, and socio-historical factors, of which the primary determinants of variability are associated with ethnic and linguistic diversity.

Author Biography

For almost a decade, Prof. Judith Rosenhouse and Prof. Rotem Kowner have led a multi-member research project on the motives for borrowing foreign lexicon, culminating with the publication of this book. Rosenhouse is a noted Israeli linguist specialized in Arabic and Hebrew, who recently retired from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology and has joined Swantech Ltd.Kowner is an Israeli Japanologist who focuses on Japanese attitudes and response to foreign culture, the West in particular, in modern times. Currently he serves as the chair of the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Haifa.

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Introduction	p. 1
The Hegemony of English and Determinants of Borrowing from Its Vocabulary	p. 4
Icelandic: Phonosemantic Matching	p. 19
French: Tradition versus Innovation as Reflected in English Borrowings	p. 44
Dutch: Is It Threatened by English?	p. 68
Hungarian: Trends and Determinants of English Borrowing in a Market Economy Newcomer	p. 82
Russian: From Socialist Realism to Reality Show	p. 98
Hebrew: Borrowing Ideology and Pragmatic Aspects in a Modern(ised) Language	p. 121
Colloquial Arabic (in Israel): The Case of English Loan Words in a Minority Language with Diglossia	p. 145
Amharic: Political and Social Effects on English Loan Words	p. 164
Farsi: The Modernisation Process and the Advent of English	p. 187
Indian Languages: Hidden English in Texts and Society	p. 208
Chinese in Taiwan: Cooking a Linguistic Chop Suey and Embracing English	p. 22ä
Japanese: The Dialectic Relationships Between 'Westerness' and 'Japaneseness' as Reflected in English Loan Words	p. 25ä
Conclusion: Features of Borrowing from English in 12 Languages	p. 27ä
Bibliography	p. 29ä
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