What Is a Loanword? The Vocabulary Every Language Takes From Its Neighbours

Two motives account for nearly all of it. The first is need: a new object, food, institution or idea arrives with its name attached, which is why English has tomato, coffee, sofa, algebra, tsunami and robot. The second is prestige, where a word from a language associated with power, learning or fashion displaces or sits alongside a perfectly adequate native one, which is why English has both a homely and a formal register for the same idea. Nouns are borrowed far more readily than verbs, and verbs more readily than function words such as pronouns and conjunctions, which are the most resistant category and whose borrowing indicates unusually intense contact. The direction of borrowing follows power almost exactly, which is why the flow between English and its contact languages has reversed twice in a thousand years.

English is an unusually well-documented case because each wave of contact left a datable layer:

• •Latin, in several waves: early trade words such as wine and street, then church vocabulary after conversion, then an enormous scholarly influx during the Renaissance
• •Old Norse, from Viking settlement, which supplied not only sky, skin, egg, knife and window but the pronouns they, them and their, which is the signature of very deep contact
• •Norman French, after 1066, which reshaped the vocabulary of law, government, war, art and cooking, producing the famous pairing of Anglo-Saxon animals with French meat, since cow, pig and sheep were tended by English speakers and beef, pork and mutton eaten by French ones
• •Greek, mostly through Latin and mostly technical, and the productive source for coining new scientific terms
• •Empire and trade: bungalow, shampoo, jungle and pyjamas from South Asia, bazaar and caravan from Persian, tea from Chinese, coffee and algebra from Arabic, canoe and hurricane from Caribbean languages, boomerang from Dharug
• •Recent and ongoing: from Japanese, Spanish, Yiddish, Hindi, Arabic and internet culture generally

Borrowing is rarely a clean transfer. Pronunciation is adapted to the receiving language's sound system, so sounds that do not exist are replaced and consonant clusters are broken up, which is why Japanese turns a borrowed word into a sequence of its own permitted syllables. Grammar is adapted too, and the plural is a common battleground, with English variously keeping the original form, as in phenomena, regularising it, as in stadiums, or maintaining both with a difference in register. Meaning shifts and usually narrows, so a word borrowed for one sense of a foreign term takes only that sense, which is why a French or German speaker encountering English borrowings from their own language frequently finds them used oddly. Calques, or loan translations, take the structure rather than the sounds, so that a compound is translated piece by piece, which is how English got skyscraper into other languages and how it got its own word for a superman from German. And back-borrowing occurs, where a word travels out, changes, and returns, which is what happened to the English word for an animated film returning from Japanese with a narrower sense.

Attempts to expel foreign vocabulary are a recurring feature of language politics and their results are instructive. The Academie francaise issues official French replacements for English technical terms, with mixed uptake: the French word for software succeeded and the officially recommended replacements for several others did not. Iceland has been the most successful, coining native compounds for new concepts rather than borrowing, so that its word for a computer combines the words for number and prophetess, and this works partly because of a small, literate and highly motivated speech community. Turkish underwent a deliberate purge of Arabic and Persian vocabulary in the 1930s as part of a nationalist modernisation, which succeeded substantially and left older texts harder for modern readers. English has had its own movement, the nineteenth-century advocates of Anglish who proposed Saxon compounds in place of Latin terms, and it produced some attractive coinages and no lasting effect. The general finding is that purism succeeds where a state, a small population and a strong national project coincide, and fails otherwise.

The anxiety that borrowing degrades a language is very old and has no support. A language with a large borrowed vocabulary has more distinctions available, not fewer, which is why English can differentiate between a hearty and a cordial welcome using words from two sources with the same original meaning. Borrowing does not displace grammar, which is the structural core of a language and is far more resistant, and English grammar remains Germanic despite a largely Romance dictionary. No language has ever been damaged by vocabulary, and the languages that are genuinely disappearing are lost for reasons of population and policy rather than lexicon. What borrowing does record is history: the layers in English vocabulary are a legible account of invasion, conversion, scholarship, empire and trade, and reading a word's etymology is frequently the shortest route to a fact about who was in contact with whom.

Languages borrow words either because a thing arrives with its name or because the source language carries prestige, with nouns borrowed most easily and pronouns hardly ever, and the direction always follows power. English shows datable layers from Latin, Norse, Norman French, Greek and the empire, including the Norse pronouns that indicate exceptionally deep contact. Borrowed words are adapted in sound, grammar and meaning, purist campaigns succeed only with a small population and a strong state project, and a borrowed vocabulary adds distinctions rather than causing decline.