Pseudo-anglicism

A pseudo-anglicism is a word in another language that is formed from English elements and may appear to be English, but that does not exist as an English word with the same meaning.[1][2][3][4][5]

For example, English speakers traveling in France may be struck by the "number of anglicisms—or rather words that look English—which are used in a different sense than they have in English, or which do not exist in English (such as rallye-paper, shake-hand, baby-foot, or baby-parc)".[6]

This is different from a false friend, which is a word with a cognate that has a different main meaning. Sometimes pseudo-anglicisms become false friends.[7]

  1. ^ Ayres-Bennett 2014, p. 325,335.
  2. ^ Ilse Sørensen, English im deutschen Wortschatz, 1997, p. 18, as quoted in Onysko, 2007, p. 53: "words that look English, but which deviate from genuine English words either formally or semantically"
  3. ^ Sicherl 1999, p. 14.
  4. ^ Duckworth 1977.
  5. ^ Onysko 2007, p. 52The term pseudo-anglicism" describes the phenomenon that occurs when the RL['receptor language'; p.14] uses lexical elements of the SL['source language'; p.14] to create a neologism in the RL that is unknown in the SL. For the German language, Duckworth simply defines pseudo anglicisms as German neologisms derived from English language material.
  6. ^ Nicol Spence 1976, as quoted in Ayres-Bennett, 2014, p. 335
  7. ^ Henrik Gottlieb, "Danish pseudo-Anglicisms: A corpus-based analysis", p. 65 in Furiassi 2015