The Life of Words

My last post focussed on words that are formed within English from other English words with non-English origins. I mostly concentrated on European donor languages, because they make up the overwhelming majority, and show the most variation. But English Englishes wherever it goes, and non-European languages have contributed plenty of English words over the years.

Many of these words will remain exotic, on the barely-Englished periphery of the language (the same is true of European sources: when is the last time you discussed Verfremdungseffekt with your friends? Yes, it is there in OED3), but some are destined to enter the mainstream, and one way to measure this is by comparing the number of new English words it engenders.

The most frequent (OED3 contains frequency data borrowed from Google Books) of these are mainly adjectives formed from proper nouns, usually for groups associated with the donor language (either the speakers themselves, or an intermediary contact group). According to the OED3 data, they are: Japanese (from Japan < Malay), Jewish (fr. Jew < Hebrew), Islamic (fr. Islam < Arabic and Turkish), Buddhist/Buddhism (fr. Buddha < Skt), Caribbean (fr. Carib < Cariban), Hinduism (fr. Hindu < Urdu and Persian).

These aren’t particularly interesting, I don’t think, nor is there much to be made of their relative frequencies. So below, for fun, I’ve selected 5 Englished derivatives from among the top quartile or so for each of OED3’s non-European language groups:

African Languages

Australian Languages

Austronesian Languages

Central and East Asian

New World (Indigenous, Pigins and Creoles)

Indian Subcontinent

Middle Eastern/Afro-Asiatic

And finally, according to my data, the 5 borrowed words with non-European origins that have given rise to the most new English words:

Lexical Progenitivity