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Words that Travel the World
The Linguistic Phenomenon of Loanwords
Last week, in an English conversation class where I teach Italian students, I asked my students if they’d like to be a celebrity as my way of getting them to use the first and second conditionals. They all told me they’d like the money, but not the life: too much stress, always in the spotlight, and paparazzi too.
“Wait, how do we say paparazzi in English?” a student asked me.
“It stays the same,” I answered. “Easier for you!”
This got me thinking, why does it stay the same? Where does this strange word come from? I looked it up and found out it was the name of a character in the movie “La dolce vita” by Federico Fellini (1960). The name was later used to refer to invasive journalists and passed on to the English language — and others — without changes.
I find it interesting how a language can just look at another one and say, “Oh, I like that word. I’m going to use it!”. In other words, it is amazing how words cannot only be invented or adapted —when languages come into contact, they can be borrowed, too. Here is a look at the many ways that words travel from one language to another.
