L1 English speakers in Prague: motivators in language use and language borrowing

Abstract

This paper identifies causes of grammatical borrowing and related grammatical phenomena in L1 English L2 Czech immigrant speech. This study contributes to the literature on causes of grammatical borrowing and considers key ideas including social pressure (Thomason and Kaufman 1988), cognitive pressure (Matras 1998; Sanchez 2005) and gap filling (Campbell 1993). Thirteen semistructured interviews were conducted. Participants were affected by social pressure and cognitive pressure surrounding their language use, whether it acted as a driving or inhibiting factor in terms of grammatical borrowing. Participants also engage in borrowing akin to “language play” (Porte 2003: 116) with those close to them; it is a conscious choice to borrow in these cases and it usually represents matter (MAT) (Matras and Sakel 2007) borrowing (Castle 2021a). This paper proposes a new model which considers both conscious and subconscious borrowing whilst also considering factors inhibiting the possibility of borrowing.

Keywords

• conscious borrowing
• grammatical borrowing
• grammatical gap filling
• immigration and language attrition
• language contact