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Contents › Section 5: Sociolinguistics, historical development and politics › answer 8 of 45

Examples of Borrowing Languages

Answered 29 September 2014✓ Accepted answer

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First, there is no such category as a 'borrowing language' equivalent to 'agglutinating language'.

Second, whatever variation there is among languages is cultural rather than linguistic. Although individual speakers may perceive this more viscerally (and report it as such).

But it's probably that there is not even a single scale along which you could grade cultures/languages. You will have to look at areas of linguistics practice, historical periods, registers and source languages.

For example:

You could compare English and German, Russian and Czech, Czech and Slovene and would find interesting differences. English will appear to borrow more technical words than German (cf. history vs. Geschichte) but the languages may be more similar at the colloquial level (cf. German 'Handy' for mobile phone). Czech will have been more resistant to borrowing at the literary level from German than Russian was but rife with borrowings at the colloquial level. It will have consciously borrowed words from Slavonic languages in the 19th century but not in the 20th. Czech will further differ from Slovene in how it transcribes foreign names. For example, Mr Beech may be transcribed in Slovene as Bíč but kept as Beech in Czech texts. However, Mrs Beech would be almost always converted into the female for form Beechová. They will not differ much in exonyms (such as London). These are not strictly borrowings but they indicate how the languages tend to integrate 'foreign' elements.

Also note above how easy (convenient) it is talk about languages when what you're talking about is the practices of different groups of speakers of those languages.

© Dominik Lukeš. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Originally published on Linguistics Stack Exchange, attributed there to Dominik Lukes (profile).