Book Review : “Małgorzata Kowalczyk, Borrowings in Informal American English”, Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Résumé 0

Borrowings have always been a testimony to language contacts, and therefore the subject of many publications, whether in journals or in dedicated books. English is especially concerned by this lexical process. The monography reviewed here, however, proposes an original approach, as it focuses on borrowings in a variety of English, i.e. American, and more precisely its informal speech sub-category. It is a well-known phenomenon that the United States stands as a melting-pot country, therefore open to many languages that have contributed to its variety of English. The research conducted by the author draws on an extensive corpus of contemporary oral and written sources, such as the press, literature, movie and TV productions and the Internet, listed in a sixteen-page appendix; they provide the 1,200 expressions and 5,500 examples in context featured in the very useful 152-page glossary offered in the second part of the book.