Globally Speaking

Motives for Adopting English Vocabulary in Other Languages

Edited by Prof. Judith Rosenhouse, Rotem Kowner

Publication date:

22 May 2008

Publisher

Multilingual Matters

Dimensions:

210x148mm
6x8"

ISBN-13: 9781847690517

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.

Rosenhouse and Kowner’s book is a welcome addition to the literature on the global impact of English and to the research on lexical borrowing. The case studies are interesting as such, each providing a wealth of information on the status and role of English in their respective language communities in carefully contextualised analyses of the borrowing process.