Abstract
Is the Use of Loanwords a Must?A study on the European Loanwords used in Modern Turkish
This study aims to investigate the usage and the impact of European loanwords in Modern Turkish. Using loanwords is a normal linguistic event in the languages of the world and it is the result of cultural contact between the speakers of different languages. Among other items, they are mostly the content words which are exchanged between the languages and the loaning is usually one-sided, i.e., one of the languages is more powerful and prestigious than the other; hence the direction of the loaning is normally from the more-prestigious to less-prestigious languages. It is a fact that in today’s world because of the ever-increasing social contacts between different nations and the scientific progresses happened, languages need to borrow and loan lexical items from and to each other. Here, it is necessary to categorize the loanwords into two groups: luxury and necessary loanwords. Having presented a rather long list of the European luxury loanwords along with their suggested Turkish equivalents, the author has tried to demonstrate that Turks should avoid using European luxury loanwords in Turkish. They, in the long term, may cause language change and deform dramatically.<
Keywords
Modern Turkish, European loanwords, luxury and necessary loanwords
