The reflection of historical language contact in present-day Dutch and Swedish

Abstract

In the present study we quantitatively examined similarly constructed samples of formal spoken Swedish and Dutch in order to compare the composition of the lexicons. Results showed that Swedish has many more loans than Dutch, namely 44.4% against 27.9%. Within the Swedish loans there is a large compartment of Low German (38.7%), whereas most loans in Dutch have a French origin (63.8%). The differences in terms of the number and distribution of loanwords between the lexical profiles of Swedish and Dutch appear to be stable, as they were attested both in the present study and in previous studies. They can be attributed to differences in the linguistic distances between source and borrowing languages and to differences in the intensity of the contacts.

The role of loanwords in the intelligibility of written Danish among Swedes

“…A comparison by Gooskens, Van Bezooijen & Kürschner (2010) of similarly constructed samples of spoken Swedish and Dutch showed that Swedish has many more loans than Dutch. Among the 1,500 most frequent words in a one-million-word database of each of the two languages, 44% were loans in Swedish against only 28% in Dutch.…”

Language contact in a mining community

“…At first sight, Cité Duits' lexicon resembles informal German. A closer look, however, reveals that numerous lexical items can (also) be associated with Belgian Dutch and Maaslands (for historical contact in the lexicon of present-day Dutch, see Gooskens et al 2010;van der Sijs 2005;see Franco et al 2019 for an analysis of loanwords in the Brabantic and Limburgish dialects of Dutch). As alluded to above, it is not always possible to determine the exact origin of a given word.…”