JohnsonWhere do new words come from?

WHERE do new words come from?  Few are purely invented, in the sense of being coined from a string of sounds chosen more or less at random. Most tend to be existing words given new meaning (“to tweet”). In other cases, a word changes its parts of speech (“to Photoshop”, “to Facebook”). And in some of the most creative instances, people chop words and recombine them to make new ones (as in “sexting”).

New words mostly become embedded through use. A few countries have official academies that declare when a word has been accepted, but they have little actual influence over how people speak. Which words make their way into a language says a lot about where phrasing comes from today.

One such official regulator is the Dansk Sprognaevn, which has the humble task of determining official spelling in Danish. Many Danes take the body’s decision to include this or that word in its spelling dictionaries as a sign that it is a “real” word. “New Danish Words, With Origin” a book by Jorgen Norby Jensen, shows how rarely new Danish forms are created by Danes from Danish roots for specifically Danish circumstances. Instead, the great majority come, one way or another, from English.

The obvious examples are those that are borrowed wholesale. Mr Jensen offers “foodie”, “selfie”, “clickbait”, “blog”, “Brexit” and “twerking” (a kind of bottom-waggling dance). Only slightly more disguised are those words whose spelling has been changed, like metroseksuel. Some are altered for Danish grammar norms, like oute, the verb “to out someone as gay”. (Danish verbs mostly require an “-e” at the end.)

Words of more exotic origin include “emoji” and “barista”, which have their origins in Japanese and Italian. But these too, Mr Jensen writes, come via English, not directly from those languages. This route is more common, it seems, than that of “quinoa”, which was borrowed directly from Spanish (which itself took the word from Quechua).

In another category are “English” words and expressions that are unknown to Anglophones. Danes have long said that someone who is fresh and ready to go is “fit for fight”. Another is “facerape”, which means to hack someone’s social-media profile in order to fiddle with its personal-information settings or to post fake status updates. Such faux-anglicisms are common in other languages too: the German Handy (mobile phone) or Kicker (table football), or the French tennisman and tenniswoman. Linguistic experts in these countries decry these words—it is bad enough to have to borrow English words, but even worse to counterfeit them, they reckon. But they cannot seem to stop them.

But the book of new Danish words shows an even deeper kind of influence. Even where words appear Danish, they are often simply part-for-part translations of English words: vejvrede is “road rage”, undskyld mit franske is “pardon my French”, and svingvaelger, “swing voter”. This shows that globalisation is not only in the surface traffic of words, but in the deeper exchange of concepts.

This is not to say that other languages do not creatively coin their own words anymore. In Denmark an amagernummerplade or “Amager number-plate” is a tattoo on the lower back, named after a once-tatty bit of Copenhagen. Svenskerhar and bundesligahar, “Swede hair” or “Bundesliga hair”, both refer to the cut known in English as a mullet. And curlingforaeldre, “curling parents”, is an interesting twist on “helicopter parents”: rather than hovering over their children, they sweep all obstacles out of their way, as in the eponymous sport.

So English borrowing is not entirely replacing native creativity, even if the heavy thumbprint of English on virtually every language in the globalised world is increasingly clear. This is not because English is particularly supple, wonderful or flexible in itself; it is more to do with the influence of innovations from the Anglosphere, from the good (blogs) to the ridiculous (twerking).

It may be that the spread of concepts from English out, rather than the other way round, is in fact to the discredit of the English-speaking world. Words spread from English because people learn English; cultural secrets from quinoa to hygge are more likely to be buried in other cultures where outsiders cannot find them. Perhaps the Anglophones are the real losers in this exchange.