English Loan Words in Chinese

During the process of language contact, a lot of language changes may appear, among which lexical borrowing, the origin lexical item from one language being used by another language, is one of the most common phenomena. As a result of globalization, the frequent contact with western culture and the English language has brought a huge amount of lexical borrowings to the Chinese language. This paper mainly looks at the language contact of the English loan words in Chinese in the following three methods, namely transliteration, semantic loan and a mixture of the two respectively. The discussion over the examination will contribute to the understanding of English as a lingua franca and its language contact with Chinese.