Chapter 1. Fair play to them

What is it about?

English lexis has long permeated European languages in the form of both ‘cultural’ or gap-filling borrowing and prestige borrowing, and there are also plentiful false or pseudo-Anglicisms. Today, globalization and language teaching policies are leading to a rapid increase in the number of Europeans proficient in English, which is likely to affect language use in Europe, as bilinguals tend to code-switch, borrow, use calques, transfer collocations, and display other manifestations of crosslinguistic interaction. Although much of this behaviour will remain at the level of ephemeral, idiosyncratic, speaker-specific deviations from monolingual behaviour, we might also expect more ‘intimate’ borrowing of abstract words, though these will not necessarily retain all (or indeed any) of their native English meanings.

Featured Image