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A loanword is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language (the recipient or target language), through the process of borrowing. Borrowing is a metaphorical term that is well established in the linguistic field despite its acknowledged descriptive flaws: nothing is taken away from the donor language and there is no expectation of returning anything (i.e., the loanword).
Loanwords may be contrasted with , in which a word is borrowed into the recipient language by being directly translated from the donor language rather than being adopted in (an approximation of) its original form. They must also be distinguished from , which are words in two or more language family that are similar because they share an etymological origin in the ancestral language, rather than because one borrowed the word from the other.
Examples of loanwords in the English language include café (from French café, which means "coffee"), bazaar (from Persian , which means "market"), and kindergarten (from German Kindergarten, which literally means "children's garden"). The word calque is a loanword, while the word loanword is a calque: calque comes from the French noun calque ("tracing; imitation; close copy"); while the word loanword and the phrase loan translation are translated from German nouns Lehnwort and Lehnübersetzung ().
Loans of multi-word phrases, such as the English use of the French term déjà vu, are known as adoptions, adaptations, or lexical borrowings.
Although colloquial and informal register loanwords are typically spread by word-of-mouth, technical or academic loanwords tend to be first used in written language, often for scholarly, scientific, or literary purposes.
The terms substrate and superstrate are often used when two languages interact. However, the meaning of these terms is reasonably well-defined only in second language acquisition or language replacement events, when the native speakers of a certain source language (the substrate) are somehow compelled to abandon it for another target language (the superstrate).
A Wanderwort is a word that has been borrowed across a wide range of languages remote from its original source; an example is the word tea, which originated in Hokkien but has been borrowed into languages all over the world. For a sufficiently old Wanderwort, it may become difficult or impossible to determine in what language it actually originated.
Most of the technical vocabulary of classical music (such as concerto, allegro, tempo, aria, opera, and soprano) is borrowed from Italian,Shanet 1956: 155. and that of ballet from French.Kersley & Sinclair 1979: 3. Much of the terminology of the sport of fencing also comes from French. Many loanwords come from prepared food, drink, fruits, vegetables, seafood and more from languages around the world. In particular, many come from French cuisine (crêpe, crème brûlée), Italian cuisine (pasta, linguine, pizza, espresso), and Chinese (dim sum, chow mein, wonton).
The phrase "foreign word" used in the image below is a mistranslation of the German Fremdwort, which refers to loanwords whose pronunciation, spelling, inflection or gender have not been adapted to the new language such that they no longer seem foreign. Such a separation of loanwords into two distinct categories is not used by linguists in English in talking about any language. Basing such a separation mainly on spelling is (or, in fact, was) not common except amongst German linguists, and only when talking about German and sometimes other languages that tend to adapt foreign spellings, which is rare in English unless the word has been widely used for a long time.
According to the linguist Suzanne Kemmer, the expression "foreign word" can be defined as follows in English: "When most speakers do not know the word and if they hear it think it is from another language, the word can be called a foreign word. There are many foreign words and phrases used in English such as bon vivant (French), mutatis mutandis (Latin), and Schadenfreude (German)." Loanwords by S. Kemmer, Rice University This is not how the term is used in this illustration:
On the basis of an importation-substitution distinction, Haugen (1950: 214f.) distinguishes three basic groups of borrowings: "(1) Loanwords show morphemic importation without substitution.... (2) Loanblends show morphemic substitution as well as importation.... (3) Loanshifts show morphemic substitution without importation". Haugen later refined (1956) his model in a review of Gneuss's (1955) book on Old English loan coinages, whose classification, in turn, is the one by Betz (1949) again.
Weinreich (1953: 47ff.) differentiates between two mechanisms of lexical interference, namely those initiated by simple words and those initiated by compound words and phrases. Weinreich (1953: 47) defines simple words "from the point of view of the bilinguals who perform the transfer, rather than that of the descriptive linguist. Accordingly, the category 'simple' words also includes compounds that are transferred in unanalysed form". After this general classification, Weinreich then resorts to Betz's (1949) terminology.
Some English loanwords remain relatively faithful to the original phonology even though a particular phoneme might not exist or have contrastive status in English. For example, the Hawaiian word aā is used by geologists to specify lava that is thick, chunky, and rough. The Hawaiian spelling indicates the two in the word, but the English pronunciation, , contains at most one. The English spelling usually removes the ʻokina and macron diacritics. (1986). 9780824807030, University of Hawaiʻi Press. ISBN 9780824807030
Most English affixes, such as un-, -ing, and -ly, were used in Old English. However, a few English affixes are borrowed. For example, the verbal suffix -ize comes from Greek -ιζειν ( -izein) through Latin -izare.
Pronunciation often differs from the original language, occasionally dramatically, especially when dealing with . This often leads to divergence when many speakers anglicize pronunciations as other speakers try to maintain the way the name would sound in the original language, as in the pronunciation of Louisville.
Turkish also has taken many words from French, such as pantolon for trousers (from French pantalon) and komik for funny (from French comique), most of them pronounced very similarly.
Word usage in modern Turkey has acquired a political tinge: right-wing publications tend to use more Arabic-originated words, left-wing publications use more words adopted from Indo-European languages such as Persian and French, while centrist publications use more native Turkish root words.
Latin is usually the most common source of loanwords in these languages, such as in Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, etc., and in some cases the total number of loans may even outnumber inherited terms (although the learned borrowings are less often used in common speech, with the most common vocabulary being of inherited, orally transmitted origin from Vulgar Latin). This has led to many cases of etymological doublets in these languages.
For most Romance languages, these loans were initiated by scholars, clergy, or other learned people and occurred in medieval times, peaking in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance era- in Italian, the 14th century had the highest number of loans. In the case of Romanian, the language underwent a "re-Latinization" process later than the others (see Romanian lexis, ), in the 18th and 19th centuries, partially using French and Italian words (many of these themselves being earlier borrowings from Latin) as intermediaries, in an effort to modernize the language, often adding concepts that did not exist until then, or replacing words of other origins. These common borrowings and features also essentially serve to raise mutual intelligibility of the Romance languages, particularly in academic/scholarly, literary, technical, and scientific domains. Many of these same words are also found in English (through its numerous borrowings from Latin and French) and other European languages.
In addition to Latin loanwords, many words of Ancient Greek origin were also borrowed into Romance languages, often in part through scholarly Latin intermediates, and these also often pertained to academic, scientific, literary, and technical topics. Furthermore, to a lesser extent, Romance languages borrowed from a variety of other languages; in particular English has become an important source in more recent times. The study of the origin of these words and their function and context within the language can illuminate some important aspects and characteristics of the language, and it can reveal insights on the phenomenon of lexical borrowing in linguistics as a method of enriching a language.
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