Beyond Borrowing: Lexical Interaction Between Englishes and Asian Languages

In their book, the authors describe the usage of and attitudes towards English in Asia since the 19th century, as well as the creative and dynamic ways in which Asians of the 21st century continually reinvent the lexicon of English, and the lexicons of their native tongues.

The current biggest source of loanwords for many of the world’s languages is English, the once obscure Germanic language that has risen to the role of a global lingua franca. However, the overwhelming influence of English is far from being entirely one-sided, at least from a lexical perspective.

Many have decried the way that English has ＂invaded＂ the vocabularies of their languages, without realizing that the English word stock is to some extent also being invaded by these languages. This book explores the phenomenon of word exchange by examining its occurrence between English and some of the major languages spoken in Asia-highly multi-ethnic, multicultural, and multilingual region where English is the predominant medium of international and intraregional communication.

Students and researchers from various linguistic areas such as World Englishes, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, lexicology, and contact linguistics will find this book appealing.

Hyejeong Ahn is a senior lecturer at the academic group of Language and Literacy at Melbourne Graduate School of Education. Her professional experience as an educator spans three countries, including Australia, South Korea, and Singapore. Her research interests include sociolinguistics in the areas of world Englishes, cultural linguistics, Korean linguistics, and intercultural communication. She is the author of a monograph, Attitudes to World Englishes: Implications for teaching English in South Korea (Routledge). Her research draws on an evidence-based approach, documenting and evaluating the fast-changing language and literacy skills required for students to participate in international affairs actively and meaningfully in the global context.

Jieun Kiaer is a professor of Korean linguistics at the University of Oxford, UK. She is the series editor for Routledge Studies in East Asian Translation and publishes widely on lexical interaction between East Asian languages and Englishes. Her recent publications includeThe History of English Loanwords in Korean (2014), Translingual Words: An East Asian Lexical Encounter with English (Routledge 2018), Delicious Words: East Asian Food Words in English (Routledge 2020), and Korean Wave in World Englishes (with Khedun-Burgoine, Routledge 2022). She is also acting as a Korean consultant for the Oxford English Dictionary (2021-).

Danica Salazar is the executive editor for World Englishes for Oxford Languages, where she leads editorial projects for world varieties of English, as well as researches and writes World English entries for the Oxford English Dictionary. She publishes and lectures regularly on lexicography, phraseology, World Englishes, and Spanish- and English-language teaching. Dr Salazar is the author of Lexical Bundles in Native and Non-native Scientific Writing (2014), co-editor of Biomedical English: A Corpus-based Approach (2013), and co-author of several language textbooks for learners of Spanish.

Anna Bordilovskaya received her PhD in linguistics from Kobe University. She holds a master’s degree, also in Linguistics, from Kobe University, and a specialist diploma in linguistics and language education from the Far-Eastern State University of Humanities in Khabarovsk, Russia. Anna has been working as a project assistant professor for the ALESS/ALES Program at the University of Tokyo since April 2019. Her research interests include language and culture contact, language acquisition, and World Englishes.