Analysis Of Language Borrowing Between English, Chinese And Japanese

Language borrowing is a widespread sociolinguistic phenomenon in the development of language. It is one of the most significant ways of acquiring new words and enriching the vocabulary of a language. Therefore, it is of great value to study language borrowing and try to find the intrinsic principles underlying this phenomenon. Considering this, the present thesis gives a comparatively thorough analysis of language borrowing among three of the most commonly used and studied languages in China at present, namely, Chinese, English and Japanese.This paper probes into language borrowing, especially lexical borrowingbetween the three languages from different perspectives, which include a historicalsurvey, channels of borrowing, classification and assimilation study. Within thedomain of assimilation, it describes the process phonetically, morphologically,semantically and grammatically so that more underlying principles are made clear.Based on the past research and my detailed analyses, hypotheses emerge as follows:(i) Language borrowing is normally induced by external factors such aspolitical, socio-economic and cultural exchange, military conquest andcolonization;(ii) culture dominates the direction of language borrowing, the inferiorculture borrowing from the superior culture; (iii) intellectuals and public media are key facilitators of languageborrowing; (iv) language borrowing is restricted by internal factors such as writing style,phonological pattern, morphological structure, and grammatical rules; (v) assimilation degree of borrowing varies; (vi) different loanwords have different vitality; (vii) loanwords normally exert a certain degree of influence on the borrowinglanguage.This paper has both theoretical and practical values. First, it has confirmed past theories on language borrowing with sufficient language data collected from sixdifferent kinds of language borrowing and consolidated them into an organic whole. Second, the research on language borrowing among three different types of languages was carried out in a systematic way and provides some reliable data and methodology for future research.