Dimensions of Chinese Borrowings in English

Cannon, Garland

doi:10.1177/007542428702000203

Cited by 11 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…In possibly the most comprehensive linguistic study ever conducted of Chinese words in general English, Cannon (1987; 1988) revealed the full scope of borrowing from Chinese, which is rarely discussed in professional literature. Cannon counted a total of 979 Chinese borrowings.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Chinese borrowings in English

Yang

2009

World Englishes

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This paper reports on a corpus-based study comparing Chinese borrowings with acceptance in general English that appear in desk dictionaries published in the 1980s with those found in dictionaries presently in use. Defined arbitrarily as borrowings collected in three to eight older or newer leading desk dictionaries, such words total 100 in the former and 154 in the latter. It is found that Chinese borrowings with acceptance have not only increased by about 54 per cent during the past 20 years, but also occur more frequently at present. Influenced by the close contact between Mandarin and English in China, the newly added words are mostly from Mandarin, rather than Cantonese or Amoy, which are responsible for a larger portion of the words in the older dictionaries. The newer loanwords are also mostly Pinyin-based, helped by the popular use of Pinyin in and outside China. Semantic fields are also found to be related to source languages, with Cantonese borrowings and the few Amoy words mostly in food and drink, and Mandarin borrowings in high culture. It is predicted that the borrowing of Chinese words will be expedited, there will be more Pinyin-based Mandarin loanwords, and the borrowings will represent various semantic fields.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Chinese borrowings in English

Yang

2009

World Englishes

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“…morning tea), and proper nouns to the CEW family, the number could exceed 1000 (Chen, ). No wonder Cannon (, p. 205), deeply perplexed, asked 30 years ago, ‘Cannot the method of calculating the number of borrowings and naturalized borrowings be made more standardized?’…”

Section: Related Work On Chinese English Wordsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Chinese English dictionary: An online resource for Chinese English lexicography

Qin

Gao

2019

World Englishes

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This study adopts a transnational perspective and attempts to survey a comprehensive range of the lexical outcome of diverse Chinese–English contact ecologies. It constructs a unified systematic framework of identifying and defining contact‐induced lexical items that originated in Chinese by qualitatively analyzing the admitted as well as excluded data of the Chinese English dictionary and evaluates the applicability of the framework by quantitatively checking the data derived from the framework against six sets of lexicographical and corpus data of three Chinese‐based varieties, namely, Hong Kong English, Singapore English and Malaysian English. Three major findings are: (1) Chinese English words (CEWs) are identifiable through three essential sets of parameters: entry form, Chinese orientation and acceptance and currency; (2) the identification criteria could be applied to locate CEWs in Chinese‐based varieties worldwide; and (3) a fair proportion of the CEWs are used in the corpora of the three Asian Englishes in GloWbE.

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“…However, Cannon (1981: 190) advocated that these studies are in great need of updating and emphasised the growing prominence of Chinese and Japanese words in English. The increasing trend of Japanese and Chinese borrowing into English has been extensively studied by Cannon (1981, 1987, 1988, 1990, 1995), Cannon and Warren (1996), Moody (1996) and Yang (2009). For example, Cannon (1981) argued that at least 587 Japanese words were recorded in standard dictionaries and that 116 words had been naturalised and widely used, suggesting Japanese was the second major non-Indo-European supplier of loans into English.…”

Section: Linguists' Attitudes Towards Loanwords In Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

Growing East Asian words in English

You¹,

Kiaer²,

Ahn³

2019

English Today

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With the change of linguistic, cultural and ethnic landscapes, multilingual, multicultural and multi-ethnic realities are increasing globally. In the case of the UK, the 2011 Census showed that the Asian or Asian British ethnic group category had one of the largest increases since 2001, with a third of the foreign-born population of the UK (2.4 million) now identifying as Asian British (Office for National Statistics, 2013). It is not surprising then, given the aforementioned demographic situation, to see many Asian-origin words in the English language. East Asian words are now entering into the English lexicon with unprecedented speed as a consequence of increased contact between East Asia and the English-speaking world.

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Dimensions of Chinese Borrowings in English

Cited by 11 publications

References 3 publications

Chinese borrowings in English

Chinese borrowings in English

The Chinese English dictionary: An online resource for Chinese English lexicography

Growing East Asian words in English

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