Chinese borrowings in English

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This paper reports on a corpus‐based study comparing Chinese borrowings with acceptance in general English that appear in desk dictionaries published in the 1980s with those found in dictionaries presently in use. Defined arbitrarily as borrowings collected in three to eight older or newer leading desk dictionaries, such words total 100 in the former and 154 in the latter. It is found that Chinese borrowings with acceptance have not only increased by about 54 per cent during the past 20 years, but also occur more frequently at present. Influenced by the close contact between Mandarin and English in China, the newly added words are mostly from Mandarin, rather than Cantonese or Amoy, which are responsible for a larger portion of the words in the older dictionaries. The newer loanwords are also mostly Pinyin‐based, helped by the popular use of Pinyin in and outside China. Semantic fields are also found to be related to source languages, with Cantonese borrowings and the few Amoy words mostly in food and drink, and Mandarin borrowings in high culture. It is predicted that the borrowing of Chinese words will be expedited, there will be more Pinyin‐based Mandarin loanwords, and the borrowings will represent various semantic fields.

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