Globally Speaking: Motives for Adopting English Vocabulary in Other Languages (Multilingual Matters, 140) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1847690513 ISBN 13: 9781847690517

Publisher: Multilingual Matters, 2008

Synopsis

This volume accounts for the motives for contemporary lexical borrowing from English, using a comparative approach and a broad cross-cultural perspective. It investigates the processes involved in the penetration of English vocabulary into new environments and the extent of their integration into twelve languages representing several language families, including Icelandic, Dutch, French, Russian, Hungarian, Hebrew, Arabic, Amharic, Persian, Japanese, Taiwan Chinese, and several languages spoken in southern India. Some of these languages are studied here in the context of borrowing for the first time ever. All in all, this volume suggests that the English lexical 'invasion', as it is often referred to, is a natural and inevitable process. It is driven by psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, and socio-historical factors, of which the primary determinants of variability are associated with ethnic and linguistic diversity.

About this title

About the Author:

For almost a decade, Prof. Judith Rosenhouse and Prof. Rotem Kowner have led a multi-member research project on the motives for borrowing foreign lexicon, culminating with the publication of this book. Rosenhouse is a noted Israeli linguist specialized in Arabic and Hebrew, who recently retired from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology and has joined Swantech Ltd.Kowner is an Israeli Japanologist who focuses on Japanese attitudes and response to foreign culture, the West in particular, in modern times. Currently he serves as the chair of the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Haifa.

Review:

"Rosenhouse and Kowner's book is a welcome addition to the literature on the global impact of English and to the research on lexical borrowing. ... [T]he overall value of this excellent book as a solid contribution to the systematization of the ongoing global process of lexical borrowing from English in the contemporary world and as a basis for enquiries concerning other languages to test and develop the model further."
      Päivi Pahta, World Englishes 30 (2011), 160.

"This book compares the use and impact of English lexical items in a dozen other languages around the world. The goal is to determine which items are taken in and why, noting as appropriate secondary effects such as the introduction of new phonemes or syntactic patterns. The common term for such a phenomenon is borrowing... This volume is a good introduction to the diversity of linguistic situations concerning this phenomenon."
            Douglas A. Kibbee, The Modern Language Journal 95 (2011): 149.

"... [T]his volume provides a substantial and important contribution to the research of language borrowing side by side with many adjacent fields, such as the global status of the English language, language policy and planning and historical-linguistic research."            
Dafna Yitzhaki, Israel Studies in Language and Society 2 (2009), 135.

About this edition

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1847690513
• ISBN 13: 9781847690517
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352
• Editor: Rosenhouse Prof. Judith, Kowner Rotem