Loanwords and the Complicated Socio-Politico-Historical Relationships Between Languages

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Margo, and I’m calling from Portland, Oregon.

Hey, Margo, welcome. What’s up?

I grew up in a Vietnamese family on my mom’s side, and since I was little, they spoke Vietnamese, and I would notice certain language patterns.

There were a lot of French loanwords that were expected, especially with the history, but sometimes there would be English sprinkled in, and I always wondered why.

And also with my Korean and Spanish-speaking friends growing up, they had a lot of official English loanwords in their respective languages.

And sometimes those words would have a completely different meaning.

And so my question is, how do words from one language evolve into another?

And what causes an English word to kind of develop into a completely different meaning in a different culture?

There are a lot of different ways that languages mix.

They can make crales.

They can make pigeons.

And there’s a little bit of difference between the two.

But more or less, they’re both about two or more languages brushing up against each other, usually because there’s multilingualism happening.

And people who speak both or two or more languages often will take the word or the syntax out of one language and use it for another, either for simplicity’s sake because that’s what they know better or because they think it’s more appropriate or because the language that they’re using, that they’re borrowing from, has a greater inventory of ideas or terms for what they’re talking about.

So we can talk about Vietnamese a little bit and be specific.

If you look at Vietnamese, it’s not just French.

Of course, there is French there because of the French colonization of Vietnam.

So a lot of Americans will have heard of banh mi, which is a type of sandwich.

And this comes from the French pandémie.

And then the Vietnamese word for coffee, it comes from the French word café.

And then the Vietnamese word for train station, it’s spelled G-A.

I don’t know how you would say that.

My Vietnamese is non-existent.

But it comes from the French word gare, G-A-R-E, meaning train station.

But older than that, Vietnamese has maybe 30% or more Vietnamese comes from older forms of Chinese, old Chinese and middle Chinese.

And so there’s words like the word for student or book or freedom.

All of these have Chinese roots.

So all of this has happened because people live in multilingual environments, either in the home or the workplace or just in the community.

And languages don’t have these strict walls between them because they don’t have strict walls in our heads.

We mix all of our languages that we know kind of into one big pot and pull something out when it seems appropriate.

Wow, that’s really interesting.

And I guess I was kind of wondering, not just for maybe Vietnamese, but for another language, what are, I guess, what are the origins of like official loan words where it becomes so ingrained in the culture or in Korean, my friend that’s Korean, they’ll, or especially her parents, they’ll kind of use English words exclusively for, for, for words that I guess were originally Korean.

And I would kind of ask her like, oh, is that like part of the language? She’s like, oh yeah, that’s just, they’re not just using English. That’s just kind of how all Koreans kind of say a certain word specifically like for phone.

And I was kind of wondering why do you kind of certain words just kind of, I guess, are quote-unquote loan words, but just become so ingrained that they’re kind of officially part of another language.

Sure. Yeah, we can talk about that.

And I used Vietnamese as an example just because you have experience in it.

And I just want to say that all of this happens to every language.

Any naturally existing language, that is a language that isn’t invented just like Esperanto or Klingon, all natural languages borrow from other languages, either in a small way or a large way.

So just like Korean, Vietnamese has borrowed the words for Internet and email and smartphone from English.

And a lot of this has to do with cultural and political and financial hegemony.

That is the dominance of English in these different parts of our community, in politics, in finance, in education, in the Internet, in technology.

And because of that dominance of English in these environments, its words are far more likely to spread to other countries.

Whether this is good or bad, not for me to say, but I do know that many governments that run official language institutions, like the French government and the Russian government, do try to find non-English words to replace these English terms when they start to become too dominant.

It’s hard to do, but they do attempt it.

And I don’t know if South Korea has one of these academies.

The influence of English on South Korean language comes from the American occupation of South Korea, from the Korean War, because of the Americans being there physically as a military and political force and having influence over culture and technology and politics.

Wow, that’s really, really fascinating.

Thank you so much.

I really appreciate it.

Sure.

Thanks for calling.

All right.

Take care, Mario.

Bye-bye.

You too.

Bye.

Wherever you are in the world, we’d love to hear from you.

There are lots of ways to reach us.

Go to our website, waywordradio.org, slash contact, and you’ll find a list there.