Swedish Blogs and English Borrowings : An Investigation into the Role of Swedish Blogs for Introducing and Establishing English Loans in Swedish

This paper investigates the role of Swedish blogs as a channel for introduction and establishment of English loans. The direct loans, covering both single-word loans and phrasal loans, were collected from nine blogs at three points in time: 2000, 2004 and 2008. The dimensions of frequency, distribution, formal integration and establishment in Swedish normative dictionaries were used to analyze the samples as unintegrated, interim or established loans in accordance with Chrystal (1988). A newspaper corpus was used to compare the borrowings’ time of appearance to see whether the blogs have a more active role in introducing borrowings than newspapers have. Of the single-word loans accounted for, 24 were unintegrated, 19 interim and 5 established. The phrasal loans showed 27 unintegrated, 30 interim and 1 established borrowing. When compared to the newspaper corpus, 10 single-word loans and 32 phrasal loans occurred only in blogs or in blogs before they occurred in the corpus, while 38 single-word loans and 26 phrases occurred in the corpus before or at the same time as in the blogs. Nine of the unintegrated or interim loans in the blogs were subsequently established in a Swedish dictionary. The results indicate that blogs do have a role in introducing and establishing borrowings in Swedish, but from this qualitative investigation it is not possible to determine the magnitude of their influence