View article

The use of single words belonging formally to one language while speaking another is perhaps one of the most conspicuous of alllanguage contact phe nomena. Importation of words from a donor language to a recipient language is a process which interests non-linguists as weIl as linguists, while for a great many bilinguals this process is apart of their everyday speech. This paper seeks to examine the process by which the phonological form of English-origin words is altered or adapted to the phonological system of Croatian and to position these findings in relation to previous studies examining Croatian-English language contact (eg. SurduCki 1978; JutroniC-Tihomirovic 1985; Fili povic 1986, 1990).

In language contact research there is little uniformity of terminology when reference is made to a) the process of an element with language x origins being used in language y discourse, and b) the result or product of this process. Haugen (1956) defines interference as a process, ie.» the overlapping of two languages «, while this process is also partly defined by certain manifestations which are not a product of it, ie.»... overlapping not induding the use of» unassimilated loanwords or of unrecognisable'established loans'«(1956: 40). As a term, interference, has been employed less by subsequent researchers of language contact and is now largely restricted to literature on language acquisition (See Appel & Muysken, 1987). Clyne (1967) adapts Haugen's and Weinreich's (1953) generalist definition of interference by removing references to norm-deviation as a characteristic of it and adopts in preference the term transference. Transference is defined …