Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This study examines the grammatical and translational characteristics of English loanwords in modern Chinese, with a focus on their usage in Internet discourse.Drawing on 30 popular English-derived terms collected from Internet platforms, such as the Language Weekly and the Chinese Inventory, this study investigates changes in parts of speech, pluralization patterns, and translation forms.Results show that most English loanwords undergo grammatical transformation, especially shifts in parts of speech to align with Chinese syntactic norms, and the number of English noun phrases is used randomly.Meanwhile, a significant portion of English loanwords are retained in their original form, with a trend of non-translation, and some even present untranslatability.The distinct differences between English and Chinese account for the grammatical changes of English loanwords in Chinese Internet discourse.At the same time, the lack of equivalent and appropriate meaning in Chinese contributes to the untranslatability of some English loanwords.These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of linguistic adaptation in multilingual contexts and provide pedagogical insights for language learning and teaching.
Authors: YANG Xuan, BI Yifei
Institution: University of Shanghai for Science and Technology
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4413804164