A comparative study of English loans in Russian and Swahili In: Cross – Cultural Studies, vol. 24, pp.169 -189., Center for Cross-Cultural Studies, Kyung Hee University. 2011

Abstract

This paper is a comparative study of English loans in Russian and Swahili. In the twenty first century, due to the advantage of English as a global language, a language of technology and business, it has had contact with many languages of the world and has become a major source of loans to many languages. Though very different from each other, both Russian and Swahili currently have English as their main source of loanwords. This study reports the extensive adaptation of English loans by Russian and Swahili and examines how this loan items are assimilated into the two languages. It concludes that beside the adaption of pure English loans they have both employed other strategies such as loan translation, semantic extensions and loanblends for vocabulary expansion.