The reflection of historical language contact in present-day Dutch and Swedish

Abstract

In the present study we quantitatively examine similarly constructed samples of formal spoken Swedish and Dutch in order to compare the composition of the lexicons. Results showed that Swedish has many more loans than Dutch, namely 44.4% against 27.9%. Within the Swedish loans there is a large compartment of Low German (38.7%), whereas most loans in Dutch have a French origin (63.8%). The differences in terms of the number and distribution of loanwords between the lexical profiles of Swedish and Dutch appear to be stable, as they were attested both in the present study and in previous studies. They can be attributed to differences in the linguistic distances between source and borrowing languages and to differences in the intensity of the contacts.