What is different about words like bread, desk, and sword compared to words like burrito, bureau, and karaoke? If you said that the second set of words comes from other languages, you were right.
The process is called “borrowing,” and it happens when one language adds a word (or sometimes a short sound sequence) from another language into its own “lexicon” (that means “word collection/inventory in a language.”) Linguists also call these words “loanwords,” although both terms are pretty funny, because we certainly don’t give them back! All languages borrow words from other languages; this process is part of the larger category of phenomenon called “language contact.” The more bilingual people there are in an area—that is, the more contact between two languages in one spot—the more likely one language is to borrow from the other, although that’s not the only way it happens.
How Do Loanwords Get Pronounced?
Well, this is where things get tricky—and interesting. Let’s look at these three loanwords: tortilla, armadillo, guillotine. We pronounce the two L’s in tortilla like a Y, as they are in Spanish. Yet in armadillo we pronounce them like an L. Now consider guillotine from French: Most English speakers pronounce the two L’s like a Y, as it is in French, too, but not all English speakers!
This spectrum of pronunciation patterns is called “assimilation.” Because English doesn’t usually pronounce L’s like Y’s, the word armadillo, we could say, has been fully assimilated into English. This could be because it has been around long enough for spelling to have influenced how speakers pronounce it.
What Is Assimilation, Exactly?
Well, in order to be used, loanwords must fit the phonological rules of the borrowing language, since a lot of the time, the original words contain sounds that the borrowing language doesn’t have. So, speakers automatically alter the words so they can say them. All native speakers unconsciously follow these rules. For example, in English we don’t cluster consonants V and L, so when we try, we stick a little space between them, out of necessity, and often without perceiving it, like the way we may pronounce the Croatian name “Vlasic pickles” like “vuh-lassik.” But, in Croatian and other languages such as Russian, that combination is common, so the speakers effortlessly blend the two sounds. Some speakers of Asian languages that do not have an L-sound may replace the L in foreign words with an R—a sound they do have, and one that falls into the same phonological category, so it makes sense as a substitute. This is just like the way English speakers often replace a Spanish rolled R with an English R. These substitutions aren’t random or illogical; they're systematic, and governed by rules. These rules—or restrictions—are called “phonotactic constraints.”
What’s really interesting (and more complicated) is that because word borrowing is a process, there are often long stretches in which the loanwords are pronounced differently in different speech communities. Here’s a fun example: Most of us in the U.S. say fillet a lot like French, without pronouncing the T. However, in Australia the word is fully assimilated into Australian English: They say “fill-it”! (Plus, you most likely have heard or will hear English speakers in some U.S. areas say tortilla with that L sound, too!) These variations across speech communities are possible when the words contain sounds that occur in both languages. For example, we say the French loanword cliché fairly close to the original: “klee-shay.” We are able to do this because we have a similar K-sound, L-sound, E-sound, “sh”-sound, and A-sound in English. Yet, we still alter the sounds slightly, and as a result, the word doesn’t sound like a French speaker is saying it.
Here is an interesting side note: While that fillet pronunciation may sound funny to many of us, most people would agree that the collection of dialects in Australia are fairly socially prestigious, meaning English there is not unfairly stigmatized worldwide, and so people are not likely to accuse Australians of ignorant pronunciations (something that unfortunately does get assigned to more stigmatized language varieties). Language and dialect “prestige,” or lack thereof, refers to the bias and stigma that people assign to ways of speaking that are associated with sociological characteristics, such as the financial or educational success of the speakers or the country. Studies about the interaction between society, culture, and language fall in the realm of sociolinguistics.
Even within one single speech community, there are sometimes variations. For example, while many people say the name of the French cathedral like “noder dame,” others say something more like “nochra dahm,” which is a bit closer to the French it came from.
Whether or not loanwords are adapted to the borrowing language or kept more “as is” depends on a variety of factors. One factor is how much people in the borrowing country hear native speakers of the lending language. Another factor is how much the sounds overlap. A third factor is how often the speech community uses the borrowed word. Yet another factor is the prestige of the lending language: Some studies show that speakers try to keep the original pronunciation more if the language is viewed as socially prestigious. (1) Finally, the longer a loanword has been borrowed, the more likely it is to be assimilated, or, at least, to have one agreed-upon pronunciation. For example, alcohol is technically a loanword, but it’s been around so long that we all say it the same way now. (1)
Why Are People Sensitive about How We Pronounce Loanwords?
Some people mock speakers for pronouncing loanwords using the speech patterns of the borrowing language, and other people mock speakers for pronouncing loanwords in the donor language “accent!” We just can’t win.
Let’s talk about that first type first. Unfortunately, it is very common for people to criticize speakers for pronouncing these words the way that the borrowing language requires. For example, people might make fun of you if you pronounce the L’s in “tortilla.” However, there are of course many reasons to avoid mocking speakers for using their own accents for foreign words, like that. For example, it’s important to remember that while you may speak the lending language, such as French or Spanish, fluently, or well enough to pronounce some words correctly, others haven’t had such exposure, or the privilege of education, or of learning and being exposed to other languages. Speakers are usually just pronouncing the words as they have always heard them. Also, think of how impossible it can be for speakers to produce sounds from languages we don’t know at all. Plus, if you happen to be using a word borrowed from a language you are familiar with, that works out great, but languages borrow from hundreds of other languages, so there is no way to make everyone able to pronounce all sounds around the world! (Here they are—click and see how many you can say!) Further, as blogger LinguiSchtick explains, brain studies show that sometimes, speakers are not even able to perceive certain foreign sounds that they don’t have in their native language—let alone produce them when pronouncing a loanword. (For more about the challenges of learning a language as an adult, and the varying degrees of bilingualism, read this article). So, it’s best not to accuse people of “butchering” a language they don’t know, especially when they are doing the best they can and speaking the way that they know.
Now let’s talk about the second way of pronouncing loanwords that people are sensitive about: honoring, so to speak, the original pronunciation. How should bilingual folks pronounce loanwords when they are fluent speakers of both languages? Bilingual anchorperson Vanessa Ruiz was criticized last year for pronouncing Spanish words with a Spanish “accent.” (You can read more about that story on LinguiSchtick’s blog.) In some ways, it seems unfair or at least unkind to criticize bilingual people for speaking as they normally would in their own language. When you hear people pronounce foreign words correctly, they may be doing it because they are they are engaging in an automatic act of “code-switching”: a language phenomenon that occurs largely unconsciously, and usually when the speaker knows that the listener is also bilingual.
What may have been off-putting to some about Ruiz is the fact that the code-switching felt less natural on live TV, because perhaps only half of her audience speaks Spanish. On the other hand, it could really only be labeled a communicative problem if the audience members who speak only English could not understand what she meant, and that was probably not an issue. Rolling R’s in Spanish words doesn’t really prevent English speakers from getting the message.
Another possibility is that people reacted to her in anger because they feel envious of people who are bilingual, though they may not be fully aware of it. Especially in the U.S., where learning a foreign language often isn’t required in schools, being fully fluent in a second language is pretty rare. Another possibility, also according to LinguiSchtick, is that people who do or do not pronounce Spanish words in Spanish ways may be expressing certain subtle political views about immigration, and cultural assimilation, which can definitely get folks riled up.
What About When We Learn a New Language, and Speak It to Native Speakers Who Don’t know English? How Should We Pronounce Their English Loanwords?
This is an interesting question! A good rule of thumb is, when you are speaking a foreign language, make your best effort to pronounce the English words the way they do, mostly because if you switch back into English accent patterns for English loanwords (hamburger is a common one), your listeners may not understand you. This applies to proper nouns and proper names, too, not just loanwords. Some people feel it is important to pronounce their own names as they truly sound in their own language, but that may not always work out well. For example, because French has no H sound, many French speakers pronounce “Hannah,” like “Anna,” no matter how much the Hannahs may try to insist otherwise! You could also find a compromise, like keeping the vowels and consonants that both languages share, but adapting the missing ones, or maybe adjusting syllable stress to a more natural pattern for the language you are speaking.
The neat thing about this is that sometimes people will switch to a foreign accent to say a name, like “Alice” as “ah-LEASE” in French, even when speaking in English, but only when the speaker knows that the other person speaks French, too, or, has met the francophone Alice in question. This is also a form of code-switching.
Here’s a funny story about a certain linguist who spent a year in France during college. She found herself following along pretty well, but then would hit a snag when French people spoke American names in a fully French accent, like this: “Sarah Jessica Parker” or “Elton John.” When she stared, baffled, they would say, “How could you not know who we’re talking about? He/she is so famous.” So, these pronunciations make sense for French people to communicate naturally with each other. It is a bit like the way we say “Paris” in English with the “S” at the end; it’s a proper noun that we use so much that it is officially an English word, even though it is spelled the same in both languages. So, this linguist learned that if she pronounced those English celebrities with a thick French pronunciation, the way they did, she was understood much faster.
So How Should We Pronounce Foreign Words?
In conclusion, here are some suggestions: Pronounce foreign words like you hear others do in your speech community; don’t criticize people who pronounce foreign words like their own native language requires; don’t criticize people who pronounce them like the foreign language; if you’d like to pronounce the foreign word in its original way, think about the people with whom you are speaking—do they speak that language, or know how to say those words the original way, too? And finally, if you’re traveling and speaking or learning to speak a foreign language there, try pronouncing English loanwords and names their way! The locals probably won’t even notice, and, they may understand you a lot faster.
(1) Lev-Ari, S., San Giacomo, M., & Peperkamp, S. (2014). The effect of domain prestige and
interlocutors’ bilingualism on loanword adaptations. Journal of Sociolinguistics 18(5), 658–684.
(2) LinguiSchtick. (2015, Sept. 29). It’s okay if you can’t pronounce foreign words. LinguiSchtick. Accessed 2016, Sept. 27. http://ift.tt/2fKgadp
This article was written by Syelle Graves, who has two master's degrees in linguistics. You can read more about her at syellegraves.com.
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