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A corpus-based study of the adaptation of English import words in Norwegian

Abstract

This paper focuses on English influence on Norwegian lexis and addresses the orthographic adaptation of import words, such as the change from blog to blogg, or squash to skvåsj. This adaptation can be viewed from a top-down perspective, by considering the effect of standardisation decisions made by the Norwegian Language Council, or from a bottom-up perspective, by considering unsolicited adaptation initiated by the language users themselves. Both types are observable in the 900 million word Norwegian Newspaper Corpus (NNC). The paper aims to show that the NNC lends itself easily to a large-scale investigation of either top-down or bottom-up adaptation. First of all, the corpus-based investigation illustrates the extent to which English-based import words are represented using original or adapted orthography. Secondly, the corpus provides empirical data that may shed significant light on the linguistic aspects of the adaptation process. Thus, through a quantitative and qualitative inspection of the data, I point to a set of linguistic and contextual factors that appear to have important bearings on the degree to which words undergo spelling adaptation. At the same time, the paper is intended to illustrate the usefulness of some of the facilities of the newly developed Corpuscle search engine and interface and to show its value when applied to a specific empirical research task.

Abstract

This paper focuses on English influence on Norwegian lexis and addresses the orthographic adaptation of import words, such as the change from blog to blogg, or squash to skvåsj. This adaptation can be viewed from a top-down perspective, by considering the effect of standardisation decisions made by the Norwegian Language Council, or from a bottom-up perspective, by considering unsolicited adaptation initiated by the language users themselves. Both types are observable in the 900 million word Norwegian Newspaper Corpus (NNC). The paper aims to show that the NNC lends itself easily to a large-scale investigation of either top-down or bottom-up adaptation. First of all, the corpus-based investigation illustrates the extent to which English-based import words are represented using original or adapted orthography. Secondly, the corpus provides empirical data that may shed significant light on the linguistic aspects of the adaptation process. Thus, through a quantitative and qualitative inspection of the data, I point to a set of linguistic and contextual factors that appear to have important bearings on the degree to which words undergo spelling adaptation. At the same time, the paper is intended to illustrate the usefulness of some of the facilities of the newly developed Corpuscle search engine and interface and to show its value when applied to a specific empirical research task.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Building a large corpus based on newspapers from the web 1
  4. Part I. Exploiting the web as a corpus – Methods and tools
  5. Corpuscle – a new corpus management platform for annotated corpora 31
  6. OBT+stat 51
  7. Exploring corpora through syntactic annotation 67
  8. Collocations and statistical analysis of n-grams 79
  9. Automatic topic classification of a large newspaper corpus 111
  10. A data-driven approach to anglicism identification in Norwegian 131
  11. Part II. Corpus-based case studies
  12. A corpus-based study of the adaptation of English import words in Norwegian 157
  13. Norm clusters in written Norwegian 193
  14. Lexical neography in modern Norwegian 221
  15. Ash compound frenzy 241
  16. Financial jargon in a general newspaper corpus 257
  17. Metonymic extension and vagueness 285
  18. Spatial metaphors in present-day Norwegian newspaper language 307
  19. Doing historical linguistics using contemporary data 331
  20. Name index 351
  21. Subject index 353
Exploring Newspaper Language
This chapter is in the book Exploring Newspaper Language
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.49.08and

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Building a large corpus based on newspapers from the web 1
  4. Part I. Exploiting the web as a corpus – Methods and tools
  5. Corpuscle – a new corpus management platform for annotated corpora 31
  6. OBT+stat 51
  7. Exploring corpora through syntactic annotation 67
  8. Collocations and statistical analysis of n-grams 79
  9. Automatic topic classification of a large newspaper corpus 111
  10. A data-driven approach to anglicism identification in Norwegian 131
  11. Part II. Corpus-based case studies
  12. A corpus-based study of the adaptation of English import words in Norwegian 157
  13. Norm clusters in written Norwegian 193
  14. Lexical neography in modern Norwegian 221
  15. Ash compound frenzy 241
  16. Financial jargon in a general newspaper corpus 257
  17. Metonymic extension and vagueness 285
  18. Spatial metaphors in present-day Norwegian newspaper language 307
  19. Doing historical linguistics using contemporary data 331
  20. Name index 351
  21. Subject index 353
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