Political loanwords

Abstract

Similar to many modern languages Bosnian continues to borrow lexical material from English. Although this is by no means a new trend, the linguo-political situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina has dramatically changed in the past twenty years and with it the dynamics and patterns of lexical borrowing. Based on a special synchronic corpus compiled from opinion pieces and editorials from the contemporary Bosnian press, this study analyzes the collocational patterns of the most frequently occurring English loanwords and compares them to their original collocational patterns extracted from a comparable English-language corpus. The findings confirm a divergence in collocational patterning between the donor and borrowing languages (Kurtböke & Potter 2000), but also suggest the existence of a “washback” effect whereby some of the new collocational patterns from the borrowing language enter the donor language through media discourse. The new collocational patterns are shown to derive from the postwar constitutional arrangement in Bosnia-Herzegovina.