Calque
A calque is a word or phrase formed by translating the parts of a foreign expression into the recipient language. The English compound skyscraper has been calqued into dozens of languages by combining each language's words for sky and scrape: Dutch wolkenkrabber, German Wolkenkratzer, French gratte-ciel, Spanish rascacielos, Vietnamese nhà chọc trời. The English term calque is itself a loanword from French calque ("tracing, copy"), while the synonym loan translation calques German Lehnübersetzung.
Place in Haugen's Taxonomy
In Haugen's (1950) framework, calques are loanshifts: borrowings that show morphemic substitution without importation. The donor pattern is preserved but every morpheme is replaced with native material. This contrasts with loanwords (full importation, no substitution) and loanblends (partial importation, partial substitution).
Types
Researchers distinguish several varieties depending on what is translated:
| Type | What is copied | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Lexical calque | Compound or derivation | Skyscraper → French gratte-ciel |
| Phraseological calque | Idiomatic phrase | French ça va sans dire → English it goes without saying |
| Semantic calque (loan shift) | New sense for an existing native word | English mouse (rodent) extended to computer mouse, copied into Spanish ratón, French souris |
| Syntactic calque | Grammatical pattern | Latin absolute constructions imitated in early Modern English |
| Morphological calque | Word-formation pattern | Greek sympatheia → Latin compassio → English compassion (each piece translated) |
The boundary between calque and ordinary translation is fuzzy. A calque has typically become conventional in the recipient language rather than coined ad hoc.
Calques as Hidden Borrowing
Because calques use only native material, speakers usually do not perceive them as foreign. English brainwashing is a calque of Mandarin xǐ nǎo (洗腦), and long time no see is widely believed to calque Chinese Pidgin English. Trade union, world view (German Weltanschauung), and flea market (French marché aux puces) are all calques that read as native English. This invisibility makes calques harder to study than loanwords and lets them carry semantic and conceptual structure across languages without leaving phonological traces.
In ELT
Calques surface in learner production as transferred multi-word expressions. A Vietnamese learner saying open the television rather than turn on the TV is calquing mở ti vi into English; a French learner producing I have 25 years calques j'ai 25 ans. These are L1 patterns reassembled with L2 lexis and count as negative transfer at the phraseological level. Recognising them requires attention to collocation, not single-word meaning, and motivates teaching chunks and collocations rather than vocabulary in isolation.
Calques are not always errors. Many become accepted target-language usage, especially in technical fields where translators settle on native compounds for new concepts. Vietnamese ELT vocabulary itself is full of calques from English and French, so learners often arrive with a calqued translation already in place for a target word.
References
- Haugen, E. (1950). The analysis of linguistic borrowing. Language, 26(2), 210–231.
- Gómez Capuz, J. (1997). Towards a typological classification of linguistic borrowing. Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 10, 81–94.
- Furiassi, C., Pulcini, V. & Rodríguez González, F. (Eds.) (2012). The Anglicization of European Lexis. John Benjamins.