Borrowing

This book focuses on the process of lexical borrowing: how bilinguals introduce and adapt foreign items into recipient-language grammatical structure; how these forms diffuse across speakers and communities; how long they persist in real time; and whether they change over the duration. Building on more than three decades of original research, Shana Poplack demystifies the phenomenon of borrowing as practiced by bilinguals in the context of their
speech communities.