Chapter 13. English direct loans in European football lexis

Abstract

Football language is arguably the world’s most widespread special language, where English has played – and still plays – a dominant role. The present study reports on the influence of English in terms of direct loans in this field, as manifested in 16 European languages. Based on a set of 25 English football words – dribble, goal, offside, hooligan, etc. – the investigation shows that while direct borrowing is common, there is a great deal of variation between the languages studied, Norwegian exhibiting the highest number of foreign loans and Finnish the lowest. The significance of the resulting patterns is discussed, providing some tentative explanations of the phenomena noted, where linguistic, sociolinguistic and cultural factors are taken into account.

Loan translations versus direct loans: The impact of English on European football lexis

“…Since the combined effect of direct loans and loan translations in relation to the languages studied has already been treated (Section 5), with four Germanic languages at the top, the following comments will briefly consider some of the factors that may be relevant to the data accounted for (see also Bergh & Ohlander 2012b).…”

“…As opposed to Bergh & Ohlander (2012b), where direct football loanwords in European languages were our primary concern, the main focus of the present study has been on loan translations in a wide sense. At the same time, a full picture of the borrowing patterns and processes involved in football vocabulary, concerning both the original 25 English words and the 16 European languages studied, presupposes a kind of split vision, a dual perspective where both types of borrowing are related to each other.…”

“…The present investigation is a follow-up study of Bergh & Ohlander (2012b), which focused on 25 English football terms adopted, to varying degrees, as direct loans -i.e. 'recognizably English in form' (Görlach 2001:xviii) -in the football vocabularies of 16 European languages (see Section 3 below).…”

“…For details concerning individual words and languages, as well as more in-depth discussion of the results briefly accounted for here, the reader is referred to the original study (Bergh & Ohlander 2012b). …”

A Hundred Years of Football English: A Dictionary Study on the Relationship of a Special Language to General Language

“…All of them may be considered relatively basic to the game in its various contexts. The main part consists of the 25 football words used in the studies by Bergh & Ohlander (2012a, 2017, in turn taken from the compilation of Anglicisms presented in Görlach (2001). However, Görlach's collection is limited to words adopted as direct loans in at least one of the 16 European languages included in his material.…”