Global Language Contact

In this paper, three recent morphological processes are studied, i.e. blending, libfixing and clipping. These processes have only just recently become productive in the prestigious global languages of English and/or French. As a result, the speakers of less prestigious and distant languages have borrowed instances of these processes in their own languages, re-analyzed the borrowed forms and, consequently, introduced the processes underlying these borrowings into their own languages. In this way the grammar of the borrowing languages is influenced by global language contact. The most obvious result of contact between languages is the borrowing of lexical items, but borrowing of non-lexical structural features also occurs. According to Thomason’s (2001: 70) borrowing scale, the borrowing of content words occurs in situations of casual contact, but as the intensity of this contact increases, more and more categories of lexical items can be borrowed and structural borrowing may also occur