Why a language borrows a word

Languages do not borrow because they are lazy. They borrow because speakers met something — an object, a prestige, a neighbor — and the old vocabulary did not already contain a convenient name.

Three pressures show up over and over. Need: the speakers encountered a thing they did not have a word for, and they kept the word that arrived with the thing. Prestige: the speakers already had a word, and they took another one because the people who used it had status they wanted to share. Contact: the speakers lived among people using another language, and words crossed the way tools and jokes cross. A single word can carry more than one of these. Kindergarten arrived in English from German because the institution arrived with the name. Pork arrived from French for a reason closer to prestige and conquest than to a missing animal.

The pig and the pork are the classroom example, and it is basically right. After the Norman Conquest, English-speaking farmers raised the animals and the French-speaking court ate them. The live animals kept their Germanic names: pig, cow, sheep. The meat, the court’s subject, took the French: pork, beef, mutton. You do not need the conquest to borrow a word. You do need a situation in which one group’s vocabulary is the one used for a particular room of life. Kitchens, courts, churches, and laboratories have all been such rooms.

A loanword is the foreign word itself, more or less. A calque is a translation of the parts. English skyscraper became, in some languages, a compound that means “sky scraper” built out of native pieces. The idea crossed. The sound did not. Loanwords are easier to notice because they look or sound unlike their neighbors. Calques hide. A language can be full of borrowed ideas that a spelling bee will never flag. If you only count the words that look foreign, you will undercount the contact.

English is a heavy borrower, and the usual statistic is easy to misuse. A large share of the words in a dictionary have Latin or French somewhere in their history, because dictionaries are full of learned, technical, and rare words, and those registers were built out of Latin and French for centuries. Everyday speech is a different sample. The most frequent English words — the, is, of, and, to — are overwhelmingly inherited Germanic. A sentence can be mostly old English in its grammar and its little words, and still contain a French noun in the middle. Both facts are true. “English is mostly Latin” is what you get if you count the dictionary and ignore how often each word is actually said.