Emprunts et équivalents : étude de leurs diffusions respectives dans plusieurs langues

Globalisation makes an impact on the lexicon of all modern languages and the way in which this occurs deserves closer study. To explore one aspect of this topic, a project was undertaken in the autumn of 2011 in view to studying loans and their equivalents in French, Greek, Polish and Czech. The aim is to examine new loans in one or more of the languages of the group. Firstly the number of languages concerned is determined (how many languages are concerned, and which of them) and just when they first appear, which may be simultaneously or only after a certain lapse of time. Then their vector is determined to ascertain whether are they adopted directly or through another language, as well as the native-language equivalents which may be created in one or other of the languages to compete with the loanword. Finally all the derivations which it may spawn are taken into consideration. This project is the continuation of an initial study presented at the LTT conference in Lisbon in 2009 and published in 2011. It was pointed out that it does not mean much to claim for example that on line has been borrowed by both Greek and French, if it is not qualified by the proviso that the loan translation en ligne was ten times more frequent in the Libération archives of the time, confirmed by various search-engines. Around twenty loanwords now current in French are being studied in the other languages in the project: binge drinking, car jacking, crowfunding, m-shopper, etc. Others, which appear in some other language, such as finisaż in Polish, have been added to the original list. This article deals with six of these: chick flick, cloud computing, finisaż, free mover, go fast et home jacking. A comparative approach brings out the social aspects peculiar to each language community, in particular the attitude of speakers to borrowed words: to accept, to ignore or to replace them with native coining.