What is it about?
English lexis has long permeated European languages in the form of both ‘cultural’ or gap-filling borrowing and prestige borrowing, and there are also plentiful false or pseudo-Anglicisms. Today, globalization and language teaching policies are leading to a rapid increase in the number of Europeans proficient in English, which is likely to affect language use in Europe, as bilinguals tend to code-switch, borrow, use calques, transfer collocations, and display other manifestations of crosslinguistic interaction. Although much of this behaviour will remain at the level of ephemeral, idiosyncratic, speaker-specific deviations from monolingual behaviour, we might also expect more ‘intimate’ borrowing of abstract words, though these will not necessarily retain all (or indeed any) of their native English meanings.