INTRODUCTION

This chapter is an exploratory piece, which will focus where possible on the motives for lexical borrowing and on the lexical fields in which borrowings take place. It will not discuss the effects of borrowing on linguistic form. Xhosa, English and Afrikaans have been chosen because the authors, between them, have some working acquaintance with all three, and because they are major languages of southern Africa with contrasting social histories.

Our point of departure will be the classical paper of Haugen (1972 [1950]) on borrowing. Although Haugen is pleasantly clear on what borrowing is, we shall take the liberty of offering a definition based on his, but somewhat different in wording: ‘the adoption into one language of items, patterns and meanings from another’. Here the term ‘adoption’, which we owe to Desmond Cole, is important to distinguish between nonce-words, borrowed ad hoc, as in ‘ons moet daardie fridge nou laai’ (we must now load that fridge), and words established in a language, as commandeer (from French via Afrikaans) is now established in English. Whether a word is really established or not can be decided only on the basis of a respectable body of evidence of use, as in the collections of actual contexts that form the data base for every entry in the Oxford English Dictionary or the Dictionary of South African English on Historical Principles (DSAE Hist). Most of us, however, make this judgement impressionistically and without data, other than those of daily experience.