Linguistics

Phonetic Adaptation of English Loanwords in Five Target Languages

Authors: Marek Koubek
Comments: 3 Pages. The language of the text is Czech.

This article presents a large-scale automated analysis of the phonetic adaptation of English loanwords in Czech, German, Spanish, Korean, and Chinese. Utilizing the ALINE sequence alignment algorithm, a dataset of 52,445 English words with verified translations was processed (comprising 119,206 word—language pairs with attestation dates ranging from 1800 to 2026). The results reveal a typological gradient of average phonetic distance: German (0.322) < Spanish (0.343) < Czech (0.350) < Korean (0.406) < Chinese (0.536). Domain analysis indicates that technological and scientific terminology exhibits a lower phonetic distance than social and political terminology. The temporal trend hypothesis is partially confirmed: German, Korean, and Chinese exhibit a negative trend, whereas Spanish displays a positive trend. The trend of global Anglicization is most pronounced in the period prior to 2000. A Kruskal—Wallis test confirms significant cross-linguistic differences ($H = 37,309$, $p < 0.001$).
Category: Linguistics