Borrowing
Borrowing is the incorporation of linguistic material from one language into another. The term covers any element that crosses a language boundary and becomes established, however partially, in a recipient system: words, phrases, morphemes, sounds, syntactic patterns, even idiomatic templates. The systematic study of borrowing dates to Haugen's The Analysis of Linguistic Borrowing (1950) and Weinreich's Languages in Contact (1953), the two foundational works of contact linguistics.
Haugen's Taxonomy
Haugen (1950) organised borrowing along an importation–substitution axis. A speaker can either import the foreign form or substitute native material for it, and the proportions yield three classes:
| Class | Importation | Substitution | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Loanword | Full morphemic | None | English café from French |
| Loanblend | Partial | Partial | Pennsylvania German bassig (bossy, English root + German suffix) |
| Loanshift / loan translation | None | Full | English skyscraper → German Wolkenkratzer |
Loanshifts include both calques (structural translation) and semantic loans (an existing native word acquires a new sense from the donor language, e.g. Spanish introducir extending from "to insert" to "to introduce a person" under English influence).
What Can Be Borrowed
Lexis is the most permeable level, but borrowing operates across the system:
- Lexical: nouns first, then verbs, adjectives; function words last.
- Phonological: new phonemes can enter through borrowed vocabulary, e.g. /ʒ/ in English from French.
- Morphological: affixes such as -able, -tion, -ism entered English from French and Latin and now attach to native stems.
- Syntactic: word-order patterns and constructions, often via translation contact (e.g. relative-clause structures in early Modern English under Latin influence).
- Pragmatic: discourse markers, politeness routines.
Thomason and Kaufman (1988) propose a borrowing scale predicting which levels are accessible at what intensity of contact, with casual contact yielding only lexical borrowing and intense contact opening structural levels.
Borrowing vs Code-Switching
The distinction is contested. Poplack and her collaborators argue that borrowed items show morphosyntactic integration into the recipient language (native inflections, default phonology, monolingual distribution), while code-switches retain donor-language grammar. Under this view, I'm going to the boulangerie with English plural marking is borrowing; I'm going to la boulangerie with French determiner agreement is a switch. Other researchers (Myers-Scotton, Treffers-Daller) treat borrowing and switching as endpoints of a continuum rather than distinct categories. Nonce borrowings, single foreign items used once but morphologically integrated, sit between the two.
Motivations
Borrowing is driven by need and by prestige. Need-based borrowing fills lexical gaps for new objects, technologies, and concepts (English yoga, sushi, algorithm). Prestige-based borrowing imports terms already available in the recipient language because the donor language carries social value in the relevant domain, hence Latin and Greek scholarly vocabulary in European languages and contemporary Anglicisms in technology, business, and youth culture.
In ELT
For learners, borrowed vocabulary in their L1 can be a positive-transfer resource. Vietnamese learners of English encounter many cognate-like Anglicisms already in circulation (marketing, email, online) and can leverage them once spelling and pronunciation differences are addressed. The same surface familiarity creates risk: borrowed forms may have narrowed, broadened, or shifted meaning in the recipient language, producing false friends. Teachers benefit from knowing which English-origin items have entered learners' L1 and how their use has diverged from the source.
References
- Haugen, E. (1950). The analysis of linguistic borrowing. Language, 26(2), 210–231.
- Weinreich, U. (1953). Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems. Linguistic Circle of New York.
- Thomason, S.G. & Kaufman, T. (1988). Language Contact, Creolization, and Genetic Linguistics. University of California Press.
- Poplack, S. (2018). Borrowing: Loanwords in the Speech Community and in the Grammar. Oxford University Press.