The Phonology of English Loanwords in German

Diplomarbeit aus dem Jahr 2011 im Fachbereich Didaktik - Englisch - Pädagogik, Sprachwissenschaft, Note: 1,0, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen (Institut für Englische Sprachwissenschaft), Sprache: Deutsch, Abstract: Can you think of an English loanword in German that originally contains the sounds

/ð/ or /¿/? No? One might now spiteful say: luckily not! Jumping on the cliché that

Germans are not able to pronounce the th-sounds properly, this saves us a lot of

acoustic mishaps. Yet, meanwhile there do exist a few loanwords containing the apico-

dental fricatives /ð/ or /¿/, as for example smoothie /'smüði/ or thriller /'¿r¿l¿/.

Still their proportion out of the total amount of English loans in German is vanishingly

small.

Bringing it to linguistic terms, these phonemes exclusively belong to the English

phoneme inventory and do not constitute part of the German language system. Therefore

the research question of this thesis is: Do phonological features influence the

borrowing of a foreign word?

There are a lot of reasons for the adaptation of loanwords and many works in linguistics

deal with them in great detail (cf. for example Holland 2007: 49ff; Fischer

2008: 1ff).

Speakers borrow words from other languages to fill gaps in their own lexical inventory.

The reasons for such lexical gaps vary greatly: cultural innovation may

introduce objects or actions that do not have a name in the native language; native

words may be perceived as non-prestigious; names of foreign cities, institutions,

and political figures which were once unknown may have entered the public eye;

new words may be introduced for play, etc. (Calabrese and Wetzels 2009b: 1)

Most discussions about the factors that influence the occurrence of a loanword go

back to syntactic, lexical, semantic or social circumstances (cf. Fischer 2008: 1f).

Having browsed many books about English loanwords, only few of them explicitly

mentioned phonological features when talking about parameters determining the appearance

of loanwords. This study tries to fill this gap by investigating the phonological

properties of English loanwords in German.

Being a study within English linguistics, the focus lies on the English etymons

that are borrowed into German. With regard to borrowing, the term etymon can be

equated with the terms root or source word since it is defined as ¿lexical form from an earlier stage in the history of a word from which the modern word is derived¿

(Nord 2002). [...]