Lexical borrowing as expression of culture, identity and attitude – empirical investigations into the social meaning potential of loanwords

The use of loanwords is not merely a lexical act (filling a lexical gap in a given language, or using a shorter word in place of a longer expression) but also a social one – an expression of self, identify and attitude.By... [ view full abstract ]

The use of loanwords is not merely a lexical act (filling a lexical gap in a given language, or using a shorter word in place of a longer expression) but also a social one – an expression of self, identify and attitude.

By keeping track of existing equivalents in the host language for the concepts expressed by loanwords, recent lexical borrowing research explicitly aims to study the social meaning potential of loanwords over native equivalents (Zenner, Speelman and Geeraerts 2014, 2012, Winter-Froemel, Onysko and Calude 2012, Calude et al. 2018). What motivates language users to select a borrowed form over a native equivalent, what is the social meaning of this choice and how can we empirically address these questions?

This colloquium seeks to bring into debate the interface between speakers (the social dimension) and language (the linguistic dimension) with regard to lexical borrowing, and to probe how language attitudes,cultural awareness, and speaker identity influence and explain the use of loanwords. In a bid to better understand this complex interface, the colloquium includes papers that encompass a range of empirical methodologies (both experimental and corpus-based) and documents a variety of contact situations. Together, the sociolinguistic analyses of loanwords presented will help further advance our understanding of the relationship between lexical change on the one hand and prestige, ideology and identity on the other hand.

Calude,Andreea,Pagel, Mark, Miller, Steven. (2018). ModellingBorrowing Success – a quantitative study of Maori loanwords. Journal of Theoretical Linguistics andCorpus Linguistics 15: 2.

Winter-Froemel, Esme, Onysko, Alexander. & Calude,Andreea. (2012). Why some non-catachrestic borrowings are more successful thanothers: a case study of English loans in German. In A. Koll-Stobbe & S.Knospe (eds.), Language Contact in Timesof Globalization. Frankfurt am Main: Lang. 119-144.

Zenner, Eline, Dirk Speelman & Dirk Geeraerts. 

-- (2014). A sociolinguistic analysis of borrowing in weak contact situations:English loanwords and phrases in expressive utterances in a Dutch reality TVshow. International Journal of Bilingualism 19(3): 333-346.

-- (2012).Cognitive Sociolinguistics meets loanword research: Measuring variation in thesuccess of anglicisms in Dutch. Cognitive Linguistics 23(4): 749-792.