Change of core English vocabulary over time

What is it about?

The place of core vocabulary has either not been debated or has been poorly represented in diachronic studies. This article is therefore an attempt to contribute to the discussion of coreness from an historical perspective. My study of the most frequent thousand items in English based on a corpus of Modern English has allowed me to compare my results with earlier empirical and non-empirical work on the subject. Some of the discrepancies concerning the impact of loanwords on the evolution of languages stem from the adherence to one type of list or another. I have clearly advocated an empirical approach based on a sufficiently large corpus while discussing some of the shortcomings or differences with earlier studies. My analysis seems to demonstrate that the English language has suffered important changes from Old English to Modern English as a result of contact with Scandinavian and Romance languages, mostly during the Middle English period; but changes at the core have also been effected by means of internal processes.

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Why is it important?

This study reflects that within our conception of "core" vocabulary, which is corpus-based, Present Day British English Vocabulary has suffered important changes, since many of these items have been imported.

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