Description
Language contact and lexical borrowing are universal linguistic phenomena and have been investigated by many scholars for different reasons, i. e. historical, linguistic, anthropological, cultural and sociolinguistic. There is no language that is entirely free from borrowed words because no single nation has ever been completely isolated. Contact with other nations inevitably leads to borrowing. Lexical borrowing occurs naturally and in most cases without the speakers’ awareness. However, the proportion of borrowed words varies radically from language to language. The present book presents three separate studies about lexical borrowing in the Greek Cypriot dialect.
The first chapter examines the lexical influence of Turkish and Arabic on the dialect. The second investigates the lexical influence of the English language on the Cypriot dialect. And the third chapter presents an experimental study which attempted to identify and investigate the motivational, attitudinal and sociocultural factors that contributed to an excessive lexical borrowing in the Cypriot dialect.
