Slavic Lexical Borrowings in English: Patterns of Lexical and Cultural Transfer
Slavic Lexical Borrowings in English: Patterns of Lexical and Cultural Transfer

Summary/Abstract: Cultural borrowing between the English and Slavic languages in the last one hundred years, and especially in the latter half of the twentieth century was mostly a unidirectional process with the English as the source and Slavic languages as the target. This paper is an attempt to fill this void in examining the other direction of lexical transfer between English and Slavic languages. The following general conclusions can be drawn from the analysis: a) Lexical and cultural influence from subordinate to dominant language is by and large limited to the culture-bound items. Borrowed vocabulary items remain marginal in the overall English vocabulary. Several exceptions from this trend, i.e., the words which have made it to the core of the English vocabulary, are result of the butterfly effect and cannot be accounted for by some general trend; b) Lexical influence of each particular language is directly proportionate to language size. Exceptions from this general trend occur, as demonstrated by East Slavic languages, when one Slavic language clearly dominates others; c) The timeline of borrowing is directly proportionate with the growth and deepening of international communication networks in the nineteenth and in particular twentieth centuries.

• Details
• Contents