A Corpus-Based Study Of Chinese Loanword Romanization In English Language

This is a diachronic study investigating the features and changes of the Chinese loanword Romanization in English speaking society. Based on the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and a few more corpus online. The object of this paper is to study Chinese loanwords of different Romanization development through time in English. It also attempts to discuss the cultural influence of Chinese loanwords on English with the help of Corpus-Based linguistic study, and to demonstrate that loaning is not only a linguistic but also a socio-linguistic phenomenon,Contemporary American English Corpus, built by Professor Mark Davies of Brigham Young University, who developed this corpus which update to2012, and also free for everyone to use. COCA’s storage capacity is now more than450million words, covering time period from1990to2012, including spoken language, novels, magazines, newspapers and academic journals, is the world’s largest free English balanced corpus. COCA’s interface design can help linguists and language learners analyze the words, phrases, sentence structures and the associated information about frequency comparison.The study investigates the Chinese loanwords in English according to their PER/MIL and FREQ over years, takes an example of "Beijing" and" Peking" compares the different Romanization of these two words, analyze the changing throughout time. The study’s result shows that, with the increasing power of China, and the increasing of international communication and universal adoption of internet, the frequency of Chinese loanwords in English increasing at an unprecedented rate. Romanization methods competing each other, frequency analyses shows that through the approaches of borrowing, as for Romanization of Chinese, Pinyin is still in the dominate field, while Postal and Wade-Giles’s frequency are fluctuating diachronically. Chinese loanwords change gradually and draw more and more attention in English language, different Romanization ways competing each other in a more complex way.