An Ecolinguistic Approach to Language Contact and Lexical Borrowing in Chinese

Abstract

Loanwords have long been recognized as an important part of Chinese vocabulary. With the ever increasing exchanges between China and the West, an immense number of loanwords have flooded into Chinese with unprecedented scale and penetrated every social aspect, which is the natural phenomenon and result of language contact and linguistic diversity. Loanwords have, to a certain extent, altered the linguistic landscape of modern Chinese. The emergence, changes and disappearance of loanwords are similar to the evolution of the natural world with the features and ecological rules of its own. Moreover, the existence and development of language share some intrinsic similarities to some degree with the ecology of natural beings. Ecolinguistics which is a newly emerging linguistic science which integrates ecology and linguistics can be demonstrated and justified in the study of loanwords, since language is inseparable from its environment, and it can never be considered in isolation. Languages can be regarded as entities, which form an ecolinguistic system with their environment, where languages multiply, interbreed, vary, influence each other mutually, compete or converge. This system is in interrelation with the environment.