When loanwords are not lone words

Abstract

Networks are being used to model an increasingly diverse range of real-world phenomena. This paper introduces an exploratory approach to studying loanwords in relation to one another, using networks of co-occurrence. While traditional studies treat individual loanwords as discrete items, we show that insights can be gained by focusing on the various loanwords that co-occur within each text in a corpus, especially when leveraging the notion of a hypergraph. Our research involves a case-study of New Zealand English (NZE), which borrows Indigenous Māori words on a large scale. We use a topic-constrained corpus to show that: (i) Māori loanword types tend not to occur by themselves in a text; (ii) infrequent loanwords are nearly always accompanied by frequent loanwords; and (iii) it is not uncommon for texts to contain a mixture of listed and unlisted loanwords, suggesting that NZE is still riding a wave of borrowing importation from Māori.

Cultural variation in New Zealand English stories about place

“…Besides these, different lexical phenomena characterise NZE, of which the use of M āori terms has been noted as the most distinguishing feature (Deverson, 1991). Thus, it is not surprising that a great variety of studies investigate different aspects of M āori borrowings in general NZE (Calude et al, 2019a(Calude et al, , 2019bDaly, 2008;Degani & Onysko, 2010;Kennedy, 2001;Macalister, 2004Macalister, , 2006Macalister, , 2007Onysko & Calude, 2014;Trye et al, 2023). In a dictionary of M āori borrowings in NZE, Macalister (2005) gathers almost 1000 M āori loans; however, a follow-up study on the knowledge of M āori loans among P ākeh ā New Zealanders shows that only about 70-80 borrowings from M āori that are not proper nouns are known on average by non-M āori New Zealanders (Macalister, 2008, p. 75).…”