“Le parole che vengono da fuori”: i forestierismi nella lingua cinese contemporanea

Abstract

This article explores how the words of foreign origin (loanwords, in Chinese wailaici) are integrated in the modern and contemporary Chinese language. The phenomenon of the introduction of the loanwords in Chinese has become more and more productive, specially in the last thirty years. Over the time the Chinese language has devised many strategies to integrate foreign words; most of the words of Japanese origin are introduced as graphic loans, while the words introduced by Western languages (specially English) are integrated as phonemic loans, loan-translations, semantic loans, or hybrid words. In recent years, many loanwords and neologisms have been created by using the language of the network, as the acronyms written in Latin letters.