Essay:To what extent is lexical borrowing necessary to fill the gaps in the native lexicon? |

A language or a dialect cannot exist on its own. Since the beginning of human history multilingualism has always been a common use among people speaking another language because it was the only way to communicate between them.
From the moment two cultures are in contact, there are exchanges of ideas, information, goods… and vocabulary. In ancient times, the Greeks created the concept of democracy, and the word that designates it, was borrowed later by the Latin before being used in English. English draws several words from the vocabulary of French cookery (chef, menu, entrée); the French borrowed musical vocabulary from the Italian (allegro, concerto), but with the birth of industrialisation and of new technologies, most other languages now borrow from English.
In countries where more than one language is spoken, the phenomenon of borrowing is very frequent. Those different languages are spoken in very close territories, so that their speakers have contact with each other and by hearing the language of the others, they end up by integrating some words of the other language.
Borrowings or loanwords, less numerous than words of the mother language (except with the Creoles) though, are extremely common in the vocabulary of many languages: this is an unconscious process and a constituent factor in the life and evolution of languages.
In my essay I will show how necessary are the lexical borrowings to fill the gaps in a native lexicon. To do so I will focus on the reasons that pushed the languages to use loanwords instead of native words and the processes that are used to integrate those new words to a defined vocabulary. I will also discuss briefly the debates that arise in some countries about the real usefulness of these borrowings.
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