Chinese These are English terms, expressions, or concepts that have been absorbed into the Chinese language, including any of
its varieties, and should not be confused with
Chinglish, the variety of the English language used by native Chinese speakers. The origins of Chinese anglicisms vary, one of the most common being those obtained by
phonetic borrowing. For example, a "
bus" (, in
Mainland China or
Taiwan) is usually called in Hong Kong and
Macao because its
Cantonese pronunciation is similar to its English counterpart. Another type of anglicism is syntactic anglicism, when a sentence is rendered following the English
word order instead of the
standard Chinese word order; for example, the word for "
network" is or , where can be translated as "net".
Finnish The anglicisms can be divided to four types: direct phonetic imitation, lexical and grammatical
calques, and contamination of orthography. Official language (as given by the
Language Planning Office) deprecates Anglicisms, and for the most part, native constructions are sufficient even in
spoken language. Nevertheless, some anglicisms creep in. Computer jargon is generally full of direct imitation, e.g. "swap". Other jargons with abundant anglicisms are pop music, scifi, gaming, fashion, automobile and to some extent scientific jargon. This is regarded a sign of overspecialisation, if used outside the context of the jargon. Generally, direct imitation is not as common, but there are examples. For example, the word
sexy , pronounced with an Y unlike in English , might be used as an adjective. This is teenager-specific. Lexical calques take an English expression, like
killer application, and produce , which does mean "an application that kills" just as in English. Readers need to know the equivalent English term to understand this. Some speakers, especially those in frequent contact with the English language, have created a grammatical calque of the English
you-impersonal. The English impersonal utilises the second person pronoun
you, e.g. ''You can't live if you don't eat
. Here, the word you
does not refer explicitly to the listener, but signifies a general statement. The same example is rendered in Finnish as , where a separate grammatical impersonal (also known as ) is used. When translated word-by-word, , it will refer directly to the listener. Here the contraction of spoken language is used instead of the of spoken language. Then, you
will need to understand that it is an anglicism, or you'' can be offended by the commanding "You there!" tone produced. (There are also native examples of the same construction, so the origin of this piece of grammar may not always be English.) An English orthographical convention is that compound words are written separately, whereas in Finnish, compound words are written together, using a hyphen with acronyms and numbers. In Finnish, and would be correct, but
process engineering or
Intel 80286 processor would not. Failure to join the words or omitting the hyphen can be either an honest mistake, or contamination from English. Another orthographical convention is that English words tend to be written as the originals. For example, the computer jargon term from
to chat is written as (chat +
frequentative), even if it is pronounced . The forms or are used, too. Sometimes, it is even standard language, e.g. , instead of according to English pronunciation .
French A distinction is made between well-established English borrowings into French, and other words and structures regarded as incorrect. The term is often pejorative, carries a large amount of political weight, and frequently denotes an excessive use of English in the French language. French has many words of English origin for which the English roots are unknown or unrecognised due to a lack of salience or the length of time since the borrowing took place; this also includes other words which are seen as English but that are well accepted as part of French (e.g.,
parking,
week-end). Other examples include (pronounced ), (meaning "public square"), and (meaning "
melancholy" rather than the organ). These are not considered anglicisms but are fully accepted as French words by the . Occasionally governments and linguistic institutions of both
Quebec and France have undertaken strenuous efforts to eradicate anglicisms, often by suggesting French replacements with French phonology and morphology. Although efforts in Quebec have been met with some success (e.g., for ), attempts by the Académie have largely been unsuccessful. Sociolinguists have attributed these failures to the general inability of linguistic institutions to enforce a linguistic norm. The Académie regularly updates a list of prescribed linguistic norms, many of which include using suggested French replacements instead of anglicisms (e.g., for ). Replacements have taken many different forms. For example, in
Quebec French, the
portmanteau word is increasingly gaining acceptance. This
neologism is a word coined from the words ("keyboard") and ("chat"). Other replacements have various forms created by the Académie and . Quebec French and
Metropolitan French tend to have entirely different anglicisms for historical reasons. Quebec French acquired its anglicisms in a gradual process of linguistic borrowing resulting from linguistic contact with English speakers for the roughly 250 years since the
Battle of the Plains of Abraham of 1759. Metropolitan French, on the other hand, mostly adopted its anglicisms in recent decades due to the post-Second World War international dominance of English, or the rise of
English as a lingua franca. Due to the differences in English borrowings between Canada and France, the people of Quebec and France often consider each other's anglicisms to be incorrect or humorous, while considering their own to be perfectly normal. An example of a Metropolitan French anglicism not used in Quebec French: • : short for , but pronounced like the English word "sweet" An example of a Quebec French anglicism not used in France; • : to
French kiss The social meaning and acceptance of anglicisms also differs from country to country due to the differences in the historical relationship to French. In Quebec, anglicisms are never used in formal documentation (government papers, instruction sheets) and very rarely used in informal writing (magazines,
journals). In 1993, the French passed the legislation
Loi Toubon which forbids the use of anglicisms (or those from other languages) in commercial and government publications. In both countries, wherever the use of an anglicism is unavoidable, it is often written in
italics or in quotations. Various anglicisms are largely differentiated on the way in which they entered the language. One type of anglicism is a
calque, or a direct translation from English. For example, the
valediction is regarded as an anglicism, since it is a direct translation of the English "sincerely yours". Other anglicisms include the wholesale adoption of English terms such as "business" or "start-up". Additionally, some English words in French might not have the same meaning as those words in English. One example is the word "golf", which has an increased
semantic field, referring not just to the game of golf, but also to a golf course, as in (trans: "we're going to the golf course"). Anglicism is a political term and does not necessarily indicate the etymology or history of the word itself. Rather, it indicates the common attitudes and perceptions about the (theoretically English) history of the word. For example, because English itself borrowed a great amount of French vocabulary after the
Norman Conquest, some anglicisms are actually
Old French words that dropped from usage in French over the centuries but were preserved in English and have now come full circle back into French. For instance, one attested origin of the verb "to flirt" cites influence from the Old French expression , which means "to (try to) seduce". Other possible origins for the word include , E. Frisian (a flick or light stroke), and E. Frisian (a giddy girl). This expression is no longer used in French, but the English
Gallicism "to flirt" has now
returned to French and is considered an anglicism, despite its likely French origins.
German Denglisch is a pejorative term used in German describing the increased use of anglicisms and
pseudo-anglicisms in the German language. It is a
portmanteau of the German words (
German) and . The term is first recorded from 1965. To some extent, the influence of English on German can be from normal language contact. The term Denglisch is however mostly reserved for forced, excessive exercises in anglicisation, or pseudo-anglicisation, of the German language.
Italian Under
Benito Mussolini, efforts were made to purify Italian of anglicisms and other foreign words. A well-known example of anglicism used in Italian is
guardrail, which has always been totally rooted in common usage, given that the Italian alternatives proposed in the last century such as:
guardavia,
sicurvia,
guardastrada and the
Helvetism guidovia have not met with any success, being little used. Recently an initiative for the Italian language is trying to spread in common language and media the Italian equivalents of
guardrail, but still have not been approved for unknown reasons. Even the Italian equivalent
idroplanaggio has never really replaced the well-known Anglicism
aquaplaning for unknown reasons. Today, Italian is one of the most receptive languages for anglicisms.
Antonio Zoppetti is nowadays one of the most prolific scholars on the topic of English interference in the Italian language.
Japanese Anglicised words in Japanese are altered to reflect the absence of certain phonemes in Japanese, such as "l" (changed to "r") and "v" (changed to "b"). Other changes occur when, for example, an English word ending in "l" becomes "ru". For example, "hotel" becomes , as in the expression (love hotel), the word is strictly speaking not an anglicism, coming from the French (with).
Latvian The first anglicisms in the written sources of
Latvian appear at the end of the 18th century, however, up until the middle 1970s they were barely researched as their number remained low and since they mostly appeared in the terminology of sports and engineering. The direct contact between Latvian and English at that time was very limited, thus most of the anglicisms entered Latvian through German or Russian. Ever since Latvia regained its independence, there has been an influx of anglicisms into the Latvian language due to the fact that media in English is more accessible than ever.
Polish Sporadic linguistic contacts between Polish and English-speaking areas have been noted at least since the 15th century. However, most early anglicisms in Polish were mostly limited to names for places in Great Britain and the Americas. The first proper anglicisms were also related to geography and were recorded in an 18th-century work by
Franciszek Siarczyński. By the end of that century there were at least 21
lexemes of English provenance in Polish usage. The 1859 dictionary of foreign words by
Michał Amszejewicz contains roughly 100 anglicisms, the so-called Vilnian dictionary of 1861 contains roughly 180 of such words. The anglicisms recorded in the 19th century were in large part words related to social, political, legal and economic concepts used in English society and lacking corresponding institutions in contemporary Poland. Another group comprised naval, sports-related and technical terms. With time the word was assimilated and remains in modern Polish dictionaries, written as . Early 19th century Dictionary of the Polish Language by
Samuel Linde includes the following anglicisms: (after London's suburb of
Vauxhall; meaning an evening garden party in contemporary Polish), , , , , , and . At the turn of the century there were roughly 250 English words in use, by 1961 the number of English lexemes in Polish rose to over 700, breaking 1000 lexemes in the 1980s and at least 1600 in 1994.
Urdu Urdish (a
portmanteau of the words "Urdu" and "English") is used, when referring to
code-switching between the two languages (this also applies to other varieties of
Hindustani, including
Hindi). Standard
Urdu includes a limited amount of anglicisms. However, many urban Urdu speakers tend to use many more anglicisms when code-switching in speech. In standard written Urdu, anglicisms and code-switching are not common. Examples: • (Standard Urdu: / ==See also==