English loanword use in Greek online women's magazines

Abstract

Owing to the extensive spread of English around the globe, English words have penetrated the lexicon of many languages. Modern Greek has been no exception as various English loanwords are used daily by its native speakers. The present paper discusses the use of English loanwords on the Greek web and more specifically in three online women's magazines. The focus, however, is not on all types of borrowings, but solely on what Myers–Scotton (2002: 239) calls core borrowings, which are defined as ‘words that more or less duplicate already existing words in the L1’. Essentially, core borrowings do not serve genuine communicative needs as they do not fill any lexical gaps in the speakers’ native language (Bybee, 2015). Nonetheless, they are borrowed as a result of the cultural pressure exerted by the more prestigious and dominant donor language (Myers–Scotton, 2006). On the other hand, cultural borrowings are words used for new objects and concepts for which there is no equivalent in the recipient language. It should also be noted that the loanwords examined in this paper have not been morphologically or orthographically assimilated into the Modern Greek language, but maintain their distinctive foreign features.