You may not be surprised to find that American English has adopted words from Hawaiian such as aloha and lei and ukulele. However, you might be surprised that English has borrowed words from other Austronesian languages such as Malay, Tagalog, and Javanese, including: amok (as in to run amok)batik, boondocks, gingham, junk (type of ship), taboo, and tattoo. Borrowed words are evidence of contact between speakers of different languages, as we noted in Chapter 1.
In the case of Polynesian words like taboo and tattoo, we can trace their introduction into English through exploration, and they are recorded in the British navigator Captain Cook’s journals of the eighteenth century (seen to the left).
The word boondocks, on the other hand, dates from the early twentieth century. It entered English through American soldiers in the Philippines who fought in the Spanish-American War of 1898. They took the Tagalog word bundok ‘mountain’ to mean ‘remote place.’
Languages – that is, speakers of languages – differ in the degree to which they are open to borrowing from other languages. If a group is isolated, as is the case for many speakers in the Amazon Basin, the opportunity for contact is low, and a dispreference for borrowing may result – but not necessarily. And it is also the case that even when a group of speakers, such as the Mongolians, finds Russian speakers to the north and great varieties of Chinese to the east, south, and west, the rate of borrowing from the surrounding languages may be low.
English as a language may be said to begin in 450 adwhen the West Germanic Angles and Saxons left their continental homeland and settled in Britain which was then occupied by Celtic speakers known as the British. The lexicon of the variety of West Germanic spoken by the Angles and Saxonswas nearly 100% Germanic. There were some Latin borrowings, notably the word Saturday from Saternes‘Saturn’s (day).’ On the whole, however, the speakers of what is known as Old English could not have been characterized as borrowers.
Today perhaps as little as30% of the modern English vocabulary isWest Germanic in origin. What happened?
The answer involves noting over 1000 years of English speakers’ contact with other languages, most significantly Old Norse and Norman French, which turned them into borrowers. As a result of the Viking invasions of England in the eighth and ninth centuries, we now have over 800 common words in English from Old Norse, a North Germanic language, such as the verbs to call and to throw. (Old English had hatan and weorpan, cognate with Modern German heissen and werfen.) Almost all words that begin with the sound [sk] also come from Old Norse: sky, skin, skirt, score, skip, skein, scratchetc.
As you see from the map, the Vikings also invaded France, primarily in Normandy, so called because it was populated by ‘men of the north.’ Once in France the Vikings shifted their language from Old Norse to Norman French. The Norman Invasion of 1066 and the subsequent rule of England by French-speaking overlords ushered in thousands of Norman French words, beginning with the vocabulary of government and the legal system, such as the very words government and law.
When Europeans went to the New World, they set in motion hundreds of years of contact with Native American languages. English-speakers now sometimes wear moccasins, eat tomatoes, hunt raccoons, smoke tobacco, travel by kayak, andsleep in hammocks. It is of interest to note that the bedrock of the American political system, namely the caucus, is from an Algonquin word meaning ‘elder, advisor.’ The first appearance of the word in English was in the journal of another captain, namely Captain John Smith, who wrote of life in Virginia in the early 1600s.
American English has been enriched by the many groups who have come to the United States over the centuries. Some people came involuntarily, such as slaves. In American English goober ‘peanut,’ gumbo ‘okra,’ as well as okraare of African origin, as is likely the juke of jukebox. German immigrants brought cookbook (as opposed to British English recipe book) and fresh meaning ‘impertinent,’ which is a nuance not present in British English. Jewish immigrants brought words like shtick and spiel.
British English has its share of borrowings from the days of Empire, and the imprint of languages from India can be heard. The word nabob is straightforward and means ‘very wealthy man’ but its etymology is complex. It comes from Hindi nabab, which in turn comes from Arabic nuwwab, a plural of na’ib ‘viceroy, deputy.’ It was a term used in the Mughal Empire at the time of the British take-over. The Mughals were Persians and thus spoke an Indo-European language. They were also Muslim and therefore had many Arabic borrowings in their language.
Nothing would seem to be more American than a hot dog with ketchup, but the wordketchupis not. In fact, it takes us back to the Austronesians because it comes into English through Malay most likely from a Chinese source. Dan Jurafsky tells the story in his entertaining book The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu(2014). Listen to the NPR interview with Professor Jurafsky here.