The Handbook of Language Contact, Second Edition

8 Contact and Lexical Borrowing

PHILIP DURKIN

1  What is Lexical Borrowing?

Lexical borrowing denotes the process by which lexical items from one language (the donor
language) are replicated in another language (the recipient language). Sometimes it is used
more restrictively to refer specifically to instances where the agentivity is taken to be on the
part of the recipient language. (See Section 10 on contrasts sometimes drawn with imposi-
tion.) The most salient type of lexical borrowing is a loanword, e.g. English sushi from Japanese
sushi, where the Japanese lexeme is duplicated in English (with some accommodation to the
sound system of English).
The suitability of the terms “borrowing” and “loanword” is often challenged on the very
reasonable grounds that nothing is removed from the donor language, either temporarily or
permanently; rather, a new lexical item is created in the recipient language by duplicating
what is found in the donor language. However, in spite of the transparent unsuitability of
the underlying metaphor, “borrowing” and “loanword” (and a whole constellation of other
terms featuring “loan”) remain usual in both popular and (most) technical use, and seem
likely to remain so.
The agentivity in lexical borrowing is, of course, only in a rather abstract sense on the part
of “a language.” It is individual speakers who adopt a word from another language in their
speech or writing; often (although not always) large numbers of individual speakers will be
doing this separately from one another. Almost always, this initial act of borrowing explains
only how the word has got into the usage of a (usually very small) minority of speakers of
the language, or, to put this another way, how this newly borrowed word has entered the
language’s variation pool of alternative ways of expressing the meaning in question (because
there will always be alternatives, even if only in the form of longer phrasal explanations of
the relevant meaning). In order to enter general usage in the language, the word must then
become adopted by a wider range of speakers, by a process of internal borrowing. These two
processes, of initial interlinguistic transfer and subsequent intralinguistic spread, are closely
interconnected but distinct and may show different motivation as well as different mecha-
nisms. Nonetheless, this distinction is frequently ignored in the literature, which typically
operates on assumptions about the agentivity of a language, in the abstract. The implications
of this, particularly for the imprecision of many of the apparently categorical distinctions
between different types of borrowing frequently made in the literature, will be a recurrent
theme in this chapter.

The Handbook of Language Contact, Second Edition. Edited by Raymond Hickey.

© 2020 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2020 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
170  Philip Durkin

2  Borrowing of Features Other Than Lexemes

This chapter will focus on lexical borrowing, but many other elements and features may also
be borrowed. Some are typically conveyed through or as a result of lexical borrowing, such
as (in phonology) the creation of new phonemic contrasts as a result of borrowing, or (in
morphology) the development of new productive affixes as a result of borrowing. These
phenomena are typically referred to as borrowing, although it is often truer to say that they
are results of lexical borrowing: in the two examples given, new phonemic contrasts or new
productive affixes may arise in the recipient language duplicating ones found in the donor
language, but the vector for this duplication is the borrowing of lexical items. Borrowing of
larger structures, such as syntactic ones, are also often linked to lexical borrowing (e.g. if bor-
rowing of verbs results in changes to patterns of verbal complementation).1
Affixes are often described as being “borrowed” from one language to another. This is
true in the sense that an affix that originates in one language can be replicated in another
language, becoming productive in new formations in that language. The process involved
is however very different from that involved in a loanword entering a language, and once
the process has been considered in more detail it may seem more accurate to describe it as
a possible consequence of lexical borrowing, rather than as a type of borrowing in its own
right. To take a familiar example, English has acquired many productive affixes that origi-
nated in French, Latin, or Greek (in many cases, two or even all three of these can reason-
ably be identified as co‐donors). Thus, ‐ment is common as the ending of words borrowed
from French and/or Latin (such as ornament, judgment, or testament) from early Middle
English (i.e. by the beginning of the fourteenth century); already in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries it is found forming a small number of new nouns in combination with
words not of French or Latin origin, such as eggment or hangment; by the sixteenth century
such formations become more common, such as acknowledgment, amazement, atonement, or
wonderment. Such formations, where there is no suspicion that a French or Latin etymon
may have existed but escaped the lexicographical record, are the clearest evidence that
–ment has become productive in English. We may thus say that ‐ment has been “borrowed”
into English, but what we mean by this is that the borrowing of large numbers of words
ending in ‐ment has led by analogy to ‐ment becoming a word‐forming element in English.
In fact, for such analogy to operate, at least one of two further things is required: there must
also either be extensive borrowing of the parent word stems and/or other words from the
same family, so that borrowing of, for instance, commence as well as commencement makes
clear the function of ‐ment as an affix (and more specifically its frequent function in forming
nouns on verbs), or there must be a command of the donor language among a sufficiently
large and influential portion of the population that is sufficiently deep to involve awareness
of the morphological composition of borrowed words; in practice, in this particular histor-
ical contact situation both of these are likely to have applied, but the former was probably
much the most influential factor. Theoretically, it is perhaps possible that knowledge of the
morphological structures of the donor language could in isolation lead to the creation of a
new affix in the recipient language, without the need for any borrowings containing that
affix: in English, it is conceivable that such formations could be found among coinages of
new technical vocabulary from elements of Latin or Greek origin in the sciences, but even
here the usual pattern is that new word‐forming elements arise on the pattern of complete
words borrowed from Latin or Greek.
In the case of some affixes arising as a result of borrowing there is a restriction to forming
new words only on stems originating in the language(s) from which the affix has originated.
For example, ‐al becomes productive in English in forming adjectives and nouns by analogy
with its function in words borrowed from French and Latin, but its productivity is almost
 Contact and Lexical Borrowing  171

entirely restricted to words of French or Latin origin (or, sometimes, Greek, following a
pattern found in Latin); thus the adjectives occasional, professional, or circumstantial, and the
nouns acquittal or refusal are thus just a few among very many examples of words formed in
‐al within English (so far as the evidence in English, French, and Latin allows one to assess)
on the model of words borrowed into English already having this suffix, but examples of
formations in ‐al on words of native (i.e. Germanic) or other origins are vanishingly rare
(bestowal and betrothal may be two such, and bridal and burial apparently show remodeling of
existing words using this suffix).
In the classificatory system for borrowings developed by Haugen (1950a, 1950b, 1953)
and still frequently referenced and summarized, such formations are classified as a type of
derivational blend, but if such words are included in a classification of borrowings then it
must be acknowledged that this is being taken in a very broad sense that includes intralin-
guistic creations that show the effects of borrowings (a point made e.g. by Winford 2003: 44).

3  Semantic Borrowing
There are several different major types of semantic borrowing commonly identified, as well
as some minor types (which in some instances may be better regarded as aspects of the
effects of lexical borrowing). All types of semantic borrowing are relatively little studied in
comparison with loanwords, largely because they are often very difficult to detect with any
degree of confidence.
Usually easiest to identify are loan translations or calques, where the structure of a word
in the donor language is replicated in the recipient language. Thus French prêt‐à‐porter is a
calque on English ready‐to‐wear (or just possibly on ready‐for‐wear), reproducing its structure
and semantics item‐for‐item (by contrast, English prêt‐à‐porter shows a subsequent loanword
from French). Similarly, Old English ælmihtiġ (modern English almighty) probably shows a
calque on Latin omnipotēns, its components all and mighty reproducing the components omni‐
‘all’ and potēns ‘mighty, powerful’ of the Latin word. Where the resemblance is too close to
be attributed to chance, and we can rule out influence from a third language, we can usually
identify a calque with reasonable confidence. Identifying the direction of influence can
sometimes be more of a challenge, but near‐certainty is often provided by such criteria as:
documentary evidence that the model existed much earlier in the donor language than the
recipient; knowledge of the direction of cultural influence; or even historical knowledge
about the circumstances of coining of the model (or a mixture of these). Typically, the evi-
dence will all be, in the strictest sense, non‐linguistic, which is perhaps one reason why this
area of study remains somewhat on the fringes of historical linguistics.
Loan translations are sometimes distinguished terminologically from loan creations, a
somewhat confusing term for a situation where a word is created in a language specifically
in order to provide a counterpart for a word in another language, but the elements from
which it is created do not correspond at all semantically to those which make up the word it
renders, for instance (in a famous example from Weinreich 1953: 51) Yiddish mitkind ‘sibling’
(literally ‘a with‐child’) the creation of which was motivated by the need for a term equivalent
to English sibling, German Geschwister, etc. In practice, many formations sit somewhere on a
cline between these two types: rather approximate loan translations are very common, and
may even be more common than completely exact ones.
Semantic loans, where a word in one language replicates a meaning shown by a word
with which it shares another meaning or meanings or in another language, are widespread
but particularly difficult to identify with certainty. Very often, where two words share one or
more core meanings in two languages, newly innovated meanings in one of the languages
will be replicated in the other, by what is essentially a process of proportional analogy. For
172  Philip Durkin

instance, Old English þrōwung ‘suffering’ acquired the additional meaning ‘(Christ’s) pas-
sion’ almost certainly on the model of the range of meanings shown by Latin passiō ‘suffering,
(Christ’s) passion’; we can have reasonable certainty in this instance, given that we know
that the new meaning was acquired with conversion to Christianity, and that Latin was the
main vector for this.
In a not uncommon pattern, semantic influence can be identified from a cognate that can
be ruled out (more or less confidently) as direct etymon on formal grounds. Thus English
popular is a borrowing from Latin populāris, but a number of its senses show clear influence
from the related French populaire.
Once we move beyond specific specialized meanings acquired in a known historical and
cultural context, certainty is often much more elusive. We may be able to detect with reason-
able confidence that close intercultural relationships play a part in words in two languages
sharing a range of meanings, but the precise details of influences can be much harder to
identify. Frequently, influence can run counter to the direction of an earlier borrowing; for
example, German Kultur was borrowed from Latin cultū ra in the seventeenth century, but in
the nineteenth century (as shown primarily by the work of social and cultural historians) its
semantic development exercised significant influence on the development of French culture
(a medieval classicizing replacement of Old French couture, regularly developed from Latin
cultū ra) and English culture (a medieval borrowing from French and Latin), and similarly on
the semantics of related words across languages of western Europe. Similar patterns may be
found in cases where there is no etymological relationship between the words concerned: for
example, German Geschichte and French histoire show many shared meanings reflecting
many instances of cross‐linguistic influence, while in English these meanings are now dis-
tributed between history (the exact counterpart of French histoire) and its variant story.

4  Loan Blends
A separate category of loan blend is frequently identified (especially following the influential
classification in Haugen 1953) for cases where adaptation occurs at the point of borrowing.
Thus, English neurotize shows a borrowing of French neurotiser with substitution of the suffix
‐ize for its French equivalent ‐iser. We can be sure that this happened in the case of this rare
technical word, because we know (on the basis of non‐linguistic evidence) that it was coined
in French by the scientist Vanlair in 1882, and we also know that the origin of the ‐t‐ in its
stem, faithfully reproduced in the English borrowing, is unexplained, hence we can rule out
a calque in English. In most cases, it is far harder to rule out alternative explanations.
Additionally, even in this instance we may prefer to classify the substitution of ‐ize for ‐iser
as simply a part of the naturalization of a loanword, similar to the (usually unremarked)
replacement of the French infinitive inflection ‐er by zero in English.2

5  Motivations for Borrowing
Most elementary discussions of lexical borrowing identify the two principal motivations for
borrowing as need and prestige: languages borrow words either because they are needed for
describing newly encountered things, processes, actions, etc., or because at the time when
the loan occurs the donor language has particular prestige in the minds of speakers of the
recipient language. Several things are worth noting here. First, a need for a new word can be
(and often is) met in ways other than by borrowing: in assessing motivation, the harder (and
often essentially unanswerable) question is typically why in a particular instance lexical bor-
rowing has been preferred over various alternatives. Thus, English tomato (borrowed
 Contact and Lexical Borrowing  173

ultimately from Nahuatl tomatl via Spanish tomate) provides a classic example of borrowing
of a word for a newly encountered thing, but a short survey of other names for the tomato
found in English and other European languages in the period of its introduction to Europe
reveals a variety of alternative naming strategies, as exemplified by Italian pomodoro, literally
‘apple of gold’, or the now obsolete French pomme d’amour and the English calque on this
love apple, or again German Paradeiser (now almost exclusively Austrian usage), earlier
Paradiesapfel, literally ‘paradise apple’.3
Prestige does often play a part in determining whether borrowing is preferred over alter-
natives, but typically “prestige” is being used here as a cover term for a set of interrelated
factors, including: cultural influence of speakers of the donor language; predominance of
speakers of the donor language in a particular field to which the borrowing belongs seman-
tically; the general state of social, cultural, trading, etc. relations between speakers of the two
languages; how widespread knowledge of the donor language is among speakers of the
recipient language, or influential groups among those speakers (i.e., if one person adopts a
word from this language, how likely is it that others will understand this as a result of their
own knowledge of the donor language). For example, English during the Middle English
period showed massive borrowing of lexis from French (usually specifically Anglo‐Norman)
and Latin. These languages were indeed prestigious in comparison with English, but we
gain a much more informed understanding both of the extent and the nature of the borrow-
ing that occurred when we consider that in this period: almost all literate English speakers
also had expert knowledge of Anglo‐Norman and Latin; for several centuries, Latin appears
to have been taught in grammar schools through the medium of Anglo‐Norman, which was
learned at a much earlier age by those destined for a grammar‐school education;4 for cen-
turies after the Norman Conquest, Latin was the formal language of legal written record as
well as of the church, while Anglo‐Norman was also preferred over English in many written
and some formal spoken functions (e.g. in legal pleading).5 We can perhaps collapse all of
this under the catch‐all of “prestige,” but only if we are using this as a shorthand for the
linguistic, social, and cultural relations between two speaker communities, and the degree
and nature of bilingualism or multilingualism in those communities.

6  Immediate and Remote Etymons

An important distinction often ignored is between the immediate and remote etymons of a
loanword. Thus in the example of tomato looked at in Section 5, the immediate etymon of
English tomato is Spanish tomate and its remote etymon is Nahuatl tomatl. In terms of the his-
torical contact situation, the English loanword resulted from contact with Spanish, not
Nahuatl, and hence the word is a Spanish loanword in English, although many speakers
may well have been aware that it ultimately had a more “exotic” origin. (In this instance
word form is one of several criteria – linguistic as well as non‐linguistic – that put the trans-
mission via Spanish really beyond doubt. When borrowed in the seventeenth century the
English word was tomate; the modern form tomato probably results from associative influence
of potato, an “exotic” word for a food originating from the New World.)
The case of English tomato is fairly clear‐cut: as well as the formal difference between the
English word and Nahuatl tomatl, we know that the word was well embedded in English
long before any extensive direct contacts between speakers of English and speakers of
Nahuatl. Thus the contexts of use of menina ‘young girl, young lady‐in‐waiting’ in English
point strongly to borrowing both directly from Portuguese and via Spanish. On such clear‐
cut instances of multiple input, see Section 7. In many other instances, the balance of proba-
bilities is less clear, and we simply cannot rule out the possibility that a remote etymon may
also partly have played a role as a direct etymon.
174  Philip Durkin

7  Multiple Inputs and Polygenesis

Many loanwords show input from more than one language. In some instances this is clearly
proved by considerations of word form, and the only difficulty is whether we should regard
the distinct forms as belonging to the same word, or as showing synonyms of ultimately the
same origin. Thus South African English babalaas (adjective) ‘hung‐over’, (noun) ‘hang‐over’,
is a borrowing from Afrikaans babalaas, which is in turn from Zulu ‐bhabhalazi, the stem of
ibhabhalazi (which is itself from an Afrikaans word that ultimately originates from European
Dutch). The South African English word also occurs in the form babalazi, showing input
directly from Zulu ‐bhabhalazi. (Here the alternative explanation would be that the form
babalazi was also transmitted via Afrikaans, but supporting evidence for this is lacking.)
Such multiple inputs are particularly common in communities where three or more lan-
guages are in frequent use. In fact, a significant proportion of the words in high‐frequency
use in contemporary published written English result from borrowing from both French and
Latin in the multilingual situation during the Middle English period outlined in Section 5.
Some particularly clear examples include accept, application, capital, element, general (adjective),
history, natural, nature, present (verb and adjective), question, use (noun and verb).6
Identification of multiple inputs has often been eschewed in traditional etymological lex-
icography, sometimes being seen as a last resort where a single etymon cannot be satisfacto-
rily settled upon. However, if the focus is on individual language users as outlined in
Section 1, such multiple inputs seem an entirely natural result of contact situations in which
individual speakers are familiar with what is, from an etymological perspective, ultimately
the same word, with equivalent form and equivalent meanings, in more than one language.
It is also likely that many words that show input from only one donor language nonethe-
less result from an accretion of multiple different instances of importation from the donor
language by different speakers, just as language‐internal derivative formations on common
patterns are likewise likely to result from the convergence of multiple instances of lexical
innovation by different individuals in comparable communicational situations, rather than
radiating from a single instance of innovation by one individual. An indicator for this among
loanwords is the frequent accretion of multiple different word forms and multiple different
meanings from a donor language over a short period of time: convergence of multiple
instances of borrowing seems much more plausible than a single instance of borrowing
­followed by multiple instances of formal or semantic influence from the donor.7

8  Borrowing vs Code‐switching
Almost all lexical borrowing assumes a degree of bilingualism: unless at least some speakers
of the donor language and recipient language can understand one another’s language to at
least a limited extent, lexical borrowing is hardly likely (simply pointing and naming could
perhaps support very limited borrowing of names for things or actions that can easily be indi-
cated by pointing). However, the term code‐switching is normally reserved for situations
where speakers who are both completely fluent in two languages switch between these lan-
guages during a conversation. It is debated to what extent communication of this sort gives
rise to lexical borrowing. In particular, there remains considerable controversy around
whether single‐word insertions of foreign‐language words by bilingual speakers are always
loanwords (nonce or one‐off loanwords, if they are not adopted elsewhere), or whether they
are sometimes not loanwords at all but single‐word code‐switches (probably now a minority
view).8 It is uncertain whether this distinction has as much force as it may appear to have
when presented in abstract terms: if such single‐word insertions are always loanwords, it is
still worth noting that such loans are more likely to occur among bilingual speakers
 Contact and Lexical Borrowing  175

addressing other bilinguals who can confidently be relied upon to know the donor‐language
word just as well as the speaker does (and hence less strong motivation is required for a loan-
word to be introduced); if, on the other hand, one classifies such instances as single‐word
code‐switches, should the use of a particular lexical item become habitual among the bilingual
community (because it fulfills a particular communicational need) it is hard to see why this
use should not subsequently spread to monolingual speakers, and this subsequent intralin-
guistic spread is likely to show very similar processes to those that apply for any loanword.

9 What Does it Mean to Say that a Language has

Borrowed a Word?
A key question, but one surprisingly seldom addressed head‐on except as regards the debate
concerning loanwords versus single‐word code‐switches, is how we determine that a word
has been borrowed into another language. Words that enter the basic, everyday, or high‐­
frequency vocabularies of the recipient language are largely unproblematic in this regard. So
are words that show some degree of morphological adaptation to the recipient language
(such as suffix substitution, e.g. neurotize discussed on p. 172), even if they occur with low
frequency. Most relatively rare words pose more of a problem, especially if they are used in
a technical field that has some particular association with the donor language; e.g. if English‐
speaking wine connoisseurs use French terms such as cuvée, en primeur, or terroir, or (if they
are keen on German wine) German terms such as Auslese, Eiswein, or Spätlese, does this mean
that these words and phrases have been borrowed into English? In deciding this, what (if
any) weighting do we give to such questions as degree of phonological or morphological
adaptation (there will always be some), or orthographic features such as retention of accents
in French or initial capitals in German, or use of italics? Is the speaker monolingual or
bilingual? But here we may encounter some circularity: a lover of German wine may have an
expert command of an extensive specialist vocabulary of German wine terms, but extremely
limited active or passive command of German beyond this. Is this an example of very limited
and specialized bilingualism? Or, particularly if a broadly similar command of such termi-
nology is shared by other enthusiasts who are essentially monolingual English speakers,
does this mean that all of these words are loanwords, albeit restricted to a very small and
specialized group of speakers and confined to a very specific lexical field? Lexicographers
have to make pragmatic decisions in such cases, and are normally very aware of how
pragmatic such decisions are, in any particular instance involving weighing against one
another large numbers of factors that may seem to point in contrary directions. Crucially, the
balance of these factors for a particular lexeme can change over time: there may be markers
of greater assimilation, such as writing cuvee rather than cuvée, or using terroir in extended
metaphorical application to the impact of region of production on products such as cheese or
sausages rather than wine; very typically, there is gradual increase in frequency of use among
an ever wider group of speakers. If we only conclude that we have a borrowing when we
are at some point along this cline, then this has significant implications for how we define
borrowing. Most significantly, a narrow focus only on the first speakers of the recipient
language to use a particular lexeme may mean that we are neglecting the key developments
that lead us to conclude that a borrowing has actually occurred.
A separate but related question is whether any systematic distinctions can be drawn bet-
ween words that show greater or lesser degree of naturalization or adaptation to the recipient
language. Dictionaries struggle with whether to flag “unnaturalized” or “semi‐naturalized”
words as a distinct category; increasingly, there is a tendency to abandon any such attempt,
since different indicators so often conflict, vary in the usage of different individuals or speaker
communities, and change over often short timescales.9 In German lexicography, and more
176  Philip Durkin

broadly in (traditional) German philological scholarship, a distinction has long been drawn
between the categories of Lehnwort and Fremdwort, where the defining characteristic of
Lehnwörter are that they show accommodation to the phonology and morphology of the bor-
rowing language and may give rise to new derivative formations, whereas Fremdwörter remain
unassimilated phonologically.10 In practice, these categories strain against the variable degree
of assimilation with regard to these different criteria shown by individual words: some foreign‐
language words conform entirely to the phonological norms of the borrowing language, hence
phonological assimilation is at most marginal; some languages – such as English – have very
limited inflectional morphology, hence many loans (for instance uncountable nouns) have no
opportunity to show assimilation to the inflectional morphology of the borrowing language;
semantics and word class both have a huge impact on whether a word gives rise to derivative
formations in the recipient language. Haugen terms such assimilation “substitution” (e.g. of a
native phoneme for one in the donor language, or of native inflectional morphology for that of
the donor language) and distinguishes this from the importation of foreign elements
unchanged, noting that “every loan [is] part importation and part substitution” (1953: 388).
Additionally, words that show little or no assimilation to the recipient language may none-
theless be very widely familiar and in common use: for instance, English appendix (from Latin
appendix) shows little phonological assimilation (because little is required), retains for many
speakers the “alien” plural appendices with modification of the word stem, and lacks derivatives
in common use (appendicitis being better regarded as a related loan from the international Latin
terminology of medicine, while in terms of wider affiliations append and appendage are only dis-
tant relatives resulting from earlier borrowing), and yet it is widely familiar both denoting a part
of the body and denoting an adjunct, addition, or appendage (especially to a text).

10  Language Shift, and Imposition

Most of the discussion in this chapter has assumed a situation of language maintenance, i.e.
linguistic transfer between communities who continue speaking the two languages concerned.
It is an interesting question whether different considerations apply in situations where
speakers of the donor language are in the process of switching to the recipient language: this
is often not regarded as borrowing at all, and it may be unhelpful to think in terms of donor
and recipient. A distinction is often made between borrowing and imposition, the essential
difference being one of agency: borrowing is by speakers of the recipient language, while
imposition denotes the process of speakers of one language bringing words (or other features)
into another language in a situation of language switch. It is often assumed that in a situation
of language switch lexical borrowing is likely to be very light, while importation of other fea-
tures (for instance prosodic or syntactic ones) may be considerable (Hickey, this volume).
However, imposition is also sometimes adduced as an explanation for cases in which very
basic and/or closed‐class vocabulary enters a language in a situation where there is no
obvious explanation from the perspective of “need” and the donor language has low prestige
(indeed, is in the process of being abandoned by its speakers). For example, Townend (2002)
makes a persuasive case for imposition during the period of language switch, explaining in
this way the many everyday and basic level words that entered Middle English from
Scandinavian varieties during the period when Scandinavian‐speaking settlements were
shifting to English (including, probably, the third person plural pronouns they and them and
possessive adjective their), whereas earlier borrowings into Old English reflect need more
closely in featuring words for new legal concepts, military or naval terminology, etc.
A challenge for such an approach is how to account for the subsequent spread of such items
within the recipient language, to populations who have never switched from the language in
which the words originated. In other words, is it enough simply to have an explanation of
 Contact and Lexical Borrowing  177

how an item has entered the variation pool of a language, or do we also need to account for
how it has gained frequency and spread in competition with alternative means of realizing
the same meaning? It may be that such interlinguistic spread is simply relatively frictionless
in comparison with movement between languages, or it may be that explanations should be
sought in sociolinguistic situations or population movements in the borrowing language, or
alternatively that functional considerations may explain spread. (For example, albeit still con-
troversially, the spread of third person plural they in English is often explained as an instance
of therapeutic change, restoring distinctions between pronoun forms after phonological
change had resulted in some varieties in homophony of the inherited pronoun forms for third
person singular masculine, third person singular feminine, and third person plural.11)

11  Borrowed Words in Basic Meanings

Most examples discussed in this chapter have been drawn from English, a language with a
particularly richly documented (and examined) history. Identification of lexical borrowings
at a time depth beyond rich written records for the language in question is much more prob-
lematic, as considerations of word form must be relied upon to identify loanwords, and even
these can be unclear particularly where the genetic affiliations of a language (such as mem-
bership of a wider language family, etc.) are uncertain or unknown. An approach that has
been much used in this area involves identifying a list of basic meanings, and the words
which normally realize each of these meanings in the language in question, these words
being assumed to be likely to be particularly resistant to borrowing. The lists devised by
Morris Swadesh have been much used. These were put together largely on the basis of
Swadesh’s intuitions and practical experience.12 More recently an ambitious attempt has
been made to produce a new list of this type, the Leipzig‐Jakarta List of Basic Vocabulary, on
an empirical basis, deriving a list of those meanings most resistant to borrowing from an
extensive cross‐linguistic survey of the etymological origins of the words realizing basic
meanings across a wide range of languages.13
The empirical method employed to generate the Leipzig‐Jakarta list has had the very
valuable consequence of also shedding considerable light on the degree of borrowing that is
typical in basic meanings cross‐linguistically, creating an approximate scale against which
individual languages can be assessed. Thus, from this perspective English emerges rather far
up in the list of “high borrowers,” while Mandarin Chinese stands out as by far the lowest
borrower among the languages surveyed.14

12  Borrowing Hierarchies and Borrowability

The extent of lexical borrowing shown in a particular contact situation, and its nature – as
for instance how much basic vocabulary is borrowed, or whether borrowing is largely
­confined to nouns or extends to adjectives, verbs, or to closed‐class grammatical items – is
often placed on a scale, ranging from light to heavy, often correlated with whether the
sociolinguistic relationship between the recipient language and the donor language is
taken to be substratal, adstratal, or superstratal.15 The likelihood of borrowing of particular
word classes is often presented separately as a borrowing hierarchy. Winford (2003)
­presents the following hierarchy based on Muysken (1981), proceeding from most to least
likely to show borrowing:16

nouns > adjectives > verbs > prepositions > co‐ordinating conjunctions > quantifiers >
determiners > free pronouns > clitic pronouns > subordinating conjunctions
178  Philip Durkin

Such scales and hierarchies are certainly useful in gaining an impression of what is typical in
various borrowing situations. They may, of course, be subject to review in the light of further
empirical work. Thus, a finding that emerged from the extensive cross‐linguistic work
undertaken in preparing the Leipzig‐Jakarta List of Basic Vocabulary (see Section 11) was
that adjectives and adverbs appear “almost as hard to borrow as verbs” (Tadmor et al. 2010:
231). Additionally, when non‐linguistic factors such as influence of the speakers of the donor
language in specific cultural or technological spheres are taken into account (compare
Section 5), the record of lexical borrowing from one language to another may often corre-
spond only extremely approximately to what a borrowing scale or general measures of bor-
rowability might predict.

NOTES

1 Compare Winford (2003: 79–89). For a useful overview of the effects of borrowing on phonology,
syntax, and morphology in the history of English, with copious examples, see Miller (2012).
2 For discussion of numerous problematic cases see Durkin (2009) 137–9.
3 See Durkin (2009) 145–7.
4 See Ingham (2012).
5 See overview in Durkin (2014).
6 See extensive discussion in Durkin (2014) 236–53.
7 See further Durkin (2009: 68–73).
8 In favor of regarding these as single‐word code‐switches see e.g. Myers‐Scotton (2002) or Thomason
(2003); against this view, see e.g. Poplack, Sankoff, and Miller (1988), Poplack and Meechan (1998),
Poplack (2004), Gardner‐Chloros (2010), Poplack and Dion (2012).
9 On such dilemmas and changing approaches in the history of the Oxford English Dictionary’s edito-
rial practices see especially Ogilvie (2013).
10 For contextualization in German linguistic and cultural history see especially Chambers and Wilkie
(1970: 70–1).
11 See summary in Durkin (2014: 175–9). For a recent attempt to explain they, their, them as endoge-
nous forms not involving borrowing see Cole (2018). In the view of the present writer borrowing
from Scandinavian remains the most convincing explanation, but Cole usefully highlights how
receptive the existing English pronoun system was to this new form, hence this much‐cited example
in the literature on lexical borrowing must always be treated carefully.
12 See especially McMahon and McMahon (2005), Wichmann and Grant (2012).
13 See Haspelmath (2009), Tadmor (2009), Tadmor et al. (2010).
14 Tadmor (2009).
15 See especially Thomason and Kaufman (1988), Thomason (2001), Thomason (2003).
16 Reproduced in Winford (2003: 51) with discussion and references to earlier such hierarchies devised
by other scholars.

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