Lexical Borrowing from English to Bangla

Abstract

Borrowing from one language to another is a usual phenomenon. One language has to borrow words from another, particularly when there is no equivalent expression in the borrower language. Borrowing gives a language better expressive capacity by enriching word stock. Bangla has borrowed a lot of words from many languages when the population concerned came into close contact with them for political, social, cultural or commercial reasons. Bangla has heavily borrowed from English, being the language of the British Raj, who ruled the Indian subcontinent for about two centuries. In the contemporary world, English is the international lingua franca and the language of industrially-technologically advanced Anglo-American civilizations, so that it exerts tremendous influences on other languages including Bangla, creating a condition of borrowing. Borrowingfrom English into Bangla is particularly conspicuous in the domains of science and information technology. When a word is borrowed, it often undergoes phonetic modification according to the pronunciation patterns of the borrower language. This paper closely examines what kinds of change took place during lexical borrowing from English to Bangla. It also explores the domains of borrowing, i.e. in which fields major loanwords came in as well as the reasons and levels of borrowing. with relation to English-Bangla transfer.