IELTS Practice Test 15

Reading Passage: Borrowed Words — Why Languages Take from One Another

A No language is an island. Wherever speakers of different languages meet – to trade, to marry, to govern or to worship – words pass between them, and linguists have long recognised that a substantial part of the vocabulary of many languages began life elsewhere. Some of these borrowings are obvious; others have been absorbed so thoroughly that most speakers would be surprised to learn they were ever foreign. Such words, known as loanwords, are among the most visible traces that contact between peoples leaves behind. What linguists have been less able to agree on is why borrowing happens at all, and why some words travel easily while others almost never do. Over the past two decades, a series of studies has turned what was once regarded as a settled question into a lively debate. The answers matter well beyond the field itself, because anyone who hopes to reconstruct the history of a language from its vocabulary needs to know which words can be trusted to have stayed at home.

B The traditional explanation is need. When a community encounters a new plant, tool or institution, the argument runs, it takes the name along with the thing. It is an intuitive idea, and for many words it is plainly right. Ilse Marwood, who examined surviving merchants' records from several Mediterranean ports, found that the earliest borrowed words in each contact situation were overwhelmingly the names of goods: fabrics, spices, units of weight. Only later did loans spread into other areas of vocabulary. Need, however, cannot account for everything. Edmund Fennick has pointed out that many languages borrow words for which they already have perfectly good equivalents, so that two words for the same thing exist side by side. In his view, such loans are driven by prestige: speakers adopt the vocabulary of a group they admire or wish to be associated with, and the borrowed word often begins life as the more fashionable or formal alternative. I find Fennick's argument persuasive as far as it goes, but it explains why a word might be attractive rather than how it actually enters a language.

C That question has been taken up by Ruth Lindqvist, whose recordings of everyday conversation in bilingual households suggest that borrowing begins with individuals rather than with communities as a whole. Speakers who move between two languages in a single conversation – a habit linguists call code-switching – slip words from one into the other, sometimes for convenience, sometimes for effect. The habit was once dismissed as a sign of imperfect command of both languages; it is now more often seen as a skilled practice. Most of these insertions vanish as soon as they are spoken. A few are picked up by listeners, repeated, and eventually used by people who speak only one of the languages and may have no idea where the word came from. On this account, a loanword is simply a code-switch that has outlived its origins. Lindqvist is careful to say that her households cannot show how often this happens, only that it does; it would take recordings made over several generations to measure the rate.

D If almost any word can, in principle, be borrowed, are some words safer than others? Anand Sethuraman compiled lists of vocabulary from more than eighty languages with well-documented histories of contact and found that words for body parts, low numbers and close family members were replaced far less often than words for, say, tools or foods. His lists were deliberately limited to languages whose written records span several centuries, so that each replacement could be dated. This has encouraged some historians of language to treat such ‘core’ vocabulary as a reliable record of a language's ancestry. Sethuraman himself is more cautious. Among his sample were several communities in which long and intense contact had replaced even these basic words, and he concludes that resistance to borrowing is a matter of degree, not an absolute barrier. To my mind, this is the most important finding of the past twenty years, because it undermines any method that treats core vocabulary as untouchable.

E Clara Vintner, by contrast, argues that the field has spent too long asking why words are borrowed and too little time asking what happens to them afterwards. Her studies show that borrowed words are rarely taken over intact. Their sounds are reshaped to fit the patterns of the new language, and their meanings frequently narrow: a word that referred to any kind of cloth in the source language may come to mean one particular fabric in the language that borrowed it. Occasionally, a word even travels back to the language it came from, carrying a changed sense with it, a round trip that can mislead anyone trying to trace it. Vintner's work is a reminder that borrowing is not a single event but the start of a long process. Whether that process can ever be fully reconstructed from written records alone is, I suspect, doubtful.