Globally Speaking

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.

The volume examines the motives for lexical borrowing from English during the last century, the processes involved in the penetration of English vocabulary into new environments, and the extent of its integration into twelve languages representing several language families. Many of these absorbing languages are studied here for the first time.

1. The Hegemony of English and Determinants of Borrowing from Its Vocabulary; 2. Icelandic: Phono-Semantic Matching; 3. French: Tradition vs. Innovation as Reflected in English Borrowings; 4. Dutch: Is It Threatened by English?; 5. Hungarian: Trends and Determinants of English Borrowing in a Market Economy Newcomer; 6. Russian: From Social Realism to Reality Show; 7. Hebrew: Borrowing Ideology and Pragmatic Aspects in a Modern(ized) Language; 8. Colloquial Arabic (in Israel): The Case of English Loanwords in a Minority Language with Diglossia; 9. Amharic: Political and Social Effects on English Loanwords; 10. Farsi: The Process of Modernization and the Advent of English; 11. Indian Languages: Hidden English in Texts and Society; 12. Chinese in Taiwan: Cooking a Linguistic Chop Suey and Embracing English; 13. Japanese: The Dialectic Relationships between "Westerness" and "Japaneseness" as Reflected in English Loanwords; 14. Conclusion: Features of Borrowing from English in Twelve Languages.