The aim of this book is to provide a linguistic description of borrowings in informal American English and to serve as a practical resource documenting this type of language. These foreign-origin expressions, comprising both slang and colloquialism, constitute a vibrant sociolinguistic phenomenon resulting from language contact, and function as an important yet rarely discussed lexical contribution to American English. Their significance stems from the sociolinguistic significance of informal language in the United States, the strong presence of borrowings in American speech reflecting the immigrant nature of the country and the growing role of ethnic minorities, as well as the increasingly common use of this type of lexicon among larger segments of American society.

Informal borrowings can be divided into three main thematic types: core, culture-specific, and miscellaneous. The core themes, shared with those in general informal language, make up the majority of borrowings and include such themes as evaluative categorization, the human body, sex, and intoxication. The culture-specific themes, inherent to immigrants and minorities, include borrowings connected with minority experiences but also racial discrimination and geography viewed from their perspective. The miscellaneous themes, constituting an all-inclusive collection, include as many as 150 themes grouped under several superordinate divisions. Their diversity and size illustrates the thematic scope of informal borrowings and demonstrates that they are not a marginal part of lexicon but can be used to refer to numerous aspects of human experience.

This chapter introduces the topic of expressivity and outlines the contributions to the book.

This chapter provides an organized ranking and a discussion of expressives in Breton. Expressives are defined as expressions whose morphophonology is not entirely arbitrary, but partly iconic. I provide an inventory of them in Breton, a Celtic modern language spoken in Western France in a bilingual context with French. I discuss the productivity of the operations of expressive morphology, their exclusive use for expressive means, and their degree of iconicity. I show for each category in turn what operations or structures might be exclusive to expressive words.

This work compares the morphosyntactic properties of expressive suffixes in four European languages: Russian, German, Spanish and Greek. It shows that although these suffixes share the same expressive meaning, they differ significantly in their syntactic structure, namely in the manner and place of attachment in the syntactic tree. Thus, the Russian and Spanish expressive suffixes that refer to the size of a referent (or size suffixes) are syntactic modifiers, while the German size suffixes are syntactic heads. And in Greek, the two most productive expressive suffixes -ak and -ul have homophonous counterparts that possess contrasting syntactic properties: syntactic heads vs. syntactic modifiers. This shows that across languages as well as within single languages, such as Greek, there is no 1:1 correspondence between the meaning and the structure of expressive forms. These findings are further supported by two novel case studies of the homophonous suffixes -its (in Greek) and -ic (in Russian).

Basque possesses a large, distinctive class of iconic elements known as ideophones (onomatopoeia in traditional terms). This chapter succinctly describes the main typological characteristics of these words, and argues that, due to their prominent status in Basque and in linguistic typology in general, they should be considered one of the main typological traits of Basque, alongside other linguistic features specific to this language such as ergativity, case alignment, and double marking.

Scots, like too many other European languages, is viewed as possessing a dearth of expressivity in spite of evidence to the contrary. This chapter documents the fact that Scots possesses a wide range of forms of expressivity as part of its grammatical repertoire – including most notably echo word formations. Echo words are a type of apophonic reduplication where a root, stem, or other morphosyntactic constituent is partially reduplicated and there is a concomitant change in the echoant; the reduplicated, or copied, portion has no independent semantic value. The change in the copy portion can involve vowel ablaut, consonant alternation/substitution, or tone/register changes.

The chapter focuses on two sets of items with hypocoristic function in Hungarian: 1. so-called embellished clippings, i.e. truncations that are subsequently furnished with one of the diminutive/endearment suffixes, such as Feri (Ferenc), Zoli/Zotya/Zotyi/Zolesz/Zolcso/Zoló (Zoltán), Kata/Kati/Kató (Katalin); 2. reduplications, typically consisting of two identical CV syllables. These can be based on first names, surnames, or some common nouns referring to people, denoting kinship relationships, profession, or property, e.g., Zozó (Zoltán), Zsozsó (Zsófia), Kokó (Kovács). Except for reduplications that are based on surnames, for all the others there is also at least one parallel hypocoristic form of the former type, i.e. an embellished clipping: Zoli/Zotya/Zotyi/Zolesz/Zolcso/Zoló – Zozó (Zoltán); Zsófi/Zsóca – Zsozsó (Zsófia). The goal of this chapter is to document the range of possibilities as well as to try to account for this peculiar distribution in the sense of which morphological processes interact with each other and in which order, but also in the sense of suggesting the factors that may have facilitated this state of affairs.

The chapter provides a general overview of lexical reduplication in Finno-Ugric languages. The research data are taken from observations of everyday life and from various written sources for major languages of this family: Finnic (Finnish, Estonian), Saamic, Mordvinic (Erzya, Moksha), Mari, Permic (Komi, Udmurt), Ugric (Hungarian, Mansi, Khanty). Finno-Ugric reduplication is rich, because, on one hand, agglutinative properties of these languages favor mergeability and repetition of various stems; on the other hand, many onomatopoeias and descriptive words (ideophones) can function as various parts of speech, mainly as adverbs and adjectives, which are often repeated. They also sometimes complete nouns or verbs. Repetitive constructions can express various semantic shades, mainly intensification, iterativity, distributivity, multiplicity, frequency, or indefiniteness. Finno-Ugric reduplication is total or partial (which is more frequent). Reduplicative tendencies are more visible and productive in Hungarian, Komi, Udmurt, and Mari, than in Saamic, in which they barely exist.