© 1994 by Oxford University Press
Articles |
A Usage Dictionary of Anglicisms in Selected European Languages1
Universität zu Köln
The lexical impact of English on other languages, especially in the course of the twentieth century, has been documented with greater or lesser comprehensiveness, but there has never been a comparison of these influences on a comparative basis. My paper describes such a project which is to be organized as an international research scheme, is planned to include up to twenty European languages and to be published as a dictionary. My restriction to Europe (and to EFL countries) is because the sociolinguistic histories of European speech communities and their languages, and the way they came to be affected by English, are similar enough to make a comparison fruitful. In my paper I define the term anglicism and discuss language-specific differences of the phenomenon and problems on the levels of spelling, pronunciation, morphology, meaning, etymology, style and social restrictions before presenting in detail the structure of the projected dictionary. A section of the paper is devoted to problems of fieldwork involving stylistic judgments of native speakers and a critical assessment of pilot studies undertaken in 1990–91. Even if the results of the statistical analysis of the responses have to be seen with a great deal of caution, they confirm that national differences persist with regard to anglicisms to a much greater extent than many would have expected in a world culture increasingly dominated by the English language. The dictionary is intended to compare these lexical imports and their native equivalents comprehensively, concentrating on present-day conditions; the data collected will prove relevant for bilingual lexicography as well as for learner's dictionaries of English used in European schools.