Anglicisms are English words used in other languages, often borrowed from subject areas like technology and popular culture. They can be pronounced or spelled differently and may change according to the grammar of the borrowing language. Pseudo-Anglicisms are English words used in ways that make no sense to native speakers. Loanwords from other languages are also common in English.
An anglicism is an English word incorporated into and used in a language other than English. These are examples of loanwords, words from one language that are borrowed from another. The term “Anglicism” is also sometimes used more generally to refer to the incorporation of other aspects of the English language, such as the use of English grammatical structure while speaking another language or literal translations, known as calques, of sentences and English expressions in another language words. Due to the global importance of the English language, anglicisms are common in many languages around the world.
Anglicisms vary in how closely they resemble the original English. In some cases, a word may be borrowed unchanged, but often the borrowed version of the word is pronounced differently from the original English version when spoken aloud or spelled differently when written to conform to the spelling of the language borrowed. The word can also be changed according to the grammar of the borrowing language. Borrowed verbs often change form to reflect things like tense, person, and gender based on the conjugation rules of the borrowed language rather than directly mimicking the different English forms of the verb, for example. Different forms of the same language often have different anglicisms. For example, loanwords from English commonly used by Portuguese speakers in Brazil or by French speakers in Québec will not necessarily be recognizable to European speakers of these languages and vice versa.
The type of English words most likely to become anglicisms in other languages are found in subject areas where speakers of another language are most likely to have the most exposure to English, such as words related to new technologies, popular culture and to trade. In German, for example, English words like “website” and “internet” are often used unchanged, and computer-related verbs are conjugated according to German rules so that terms like “download” and “crash” download and stop. Another example is Finnish, where the English expression “killer app,” referring to a computer program desirable enough to stimulate sales of the operating system or the hardware needed to run it, is directly transformed into the calque mappajasovellus, “a application that kills”. Modern French incorporates many anglicisms that refer to musical styles, such as raps.
A closely related phenomenon is a type of word called pseudo-Anglicism, which is a word borrowed from English by another language but used in ways that would make no sense to a native English speaker. This often happens when an English word closely resembles a word in another language despite having a different meaning, when speakers of the borrowed language incorporate English words into new expressions or compound words that don’t exist in English, or simply because the meaning of the word borrowed in the borrowed language has drifted into something else. For example, in many European languages “play” refers to what a native English speaker would call lip-synching, and the loan word “smoke” refers to a tuxedo. In modern Korean, the terms “service,” “sharp pencil,” and “limousine” actually mean “free,” “mechanical pencil,” and “airport shuttle bus,” respectively, and “fight” is often yelled at sporting events as a is an expression of encouragement or appreciation for athletes.
Borrowing of vocabulary and other linguistic elements from one language by another is a common and ancient phenomenon found in languages around the world, including English. The English language has tens of thousands of words and expressions that originated in or were translated from other languages. These loanwords often have names similar to “anglicism” that reflect their origins, such as “latinism,” meaning a borrowed word from Latin, and “gallicism,” meaning a borrowed word from French. Ironically, some English words now used in other languages actually entered the English language as loanwords from other languages, such as French, but have been used by English speakers for so long that they are considered native English words and are considered Anglicisms when borrowed.
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