Wanderwörter in languages of the Americas and Australia

Abstract

Wanderwörter are a problematic set of words in historical linguistics. They usually make up a small proportion of the total vocabulary of individual languages, and only a minority of loanwords. They are, however, found frequently in languages from across the world. There is, to our knowledge, no general synthesis of Wanderwörter patterns, causes of exceptionally high borrowing rates for particular lexical items, or estimates of their frequency across language families. Claims about the causes of their spread exist, but have not been widely tested. Nor, despite researchers’ intuitions that Wanderwörter form a distinct type of borrowing, is there a clear demonstration that Wanderwörter are, in fact, different from other loanwords in any concrete way. In the present paper, we examine the phenomenon of Wanderwörter using a standard sample of vocabulary in languages of Australia, North America and South America. The investigation presented here examines Wanderwörter in great enough detail to answer questions about the linguistic and social processes by which Wanderwörter migrate as well as the shapes and densities of the resulting networks. We show that Wanderwörter can be categorically distinguished from other borrowing. The study of Wanderwörter to date has focused on agricultural or industrialized societies; however, the phenomenon is well attested in networks of smaller languages. There are areal differences in types of Wanderwörter and the networks through which they spread. Specific categories of cultural association, including but not limited to agricultural cultivation, condition widespread borrowing. Wanderwörter are outliers in the realm of loanwords, borrowed far more frequently than typical lexical items but still a subset of a more general phenomenon. We show that the link between Wanderwörter and cultural diffusion may be a more sound basis for defining this term than the traditional definitions that invoke the loan frequency, areality, or untraceability of these terms.