The Use of English-Language Business and Finance Terms in European Languages

Abstract

Although it is generally accepted that English is becoming the lingua franca of international business, the details of this process are not well understood. This article uses the Google Books corpus to provide both a quantitative and a qualitative investigation of the ways in which specific English business terms are penetrating major European languages. Some English business terms now appear to be firmly established in other languages, and can be classified as lexical borrowings, while the use of other terms is better described as code-switching.