Invisible Anglicisms in Slovene

An Overview

Abstract

ABSTRACT · While Slovene uses numerous visible anglicisms, which are either established and lexicalized on the one hand, or fashionable luxury loans (Onysko, Winter-Froemel 2011) on the other, there appear several examples of invisible anglicisms whose structure is clearly influenced by English. These loan translations are extremely difficult to detect; such items and phrases slither into the language and only careful language users sense that something ‘sounds unusual’ or that there might be a more idiomatic alternative in Slovene. The structures and meanings of some of these calques, but also their frequencies, are checked by means of the Slovene corpus Gigafida 2.0. An attempt at a classification of these loan borrowings has been made, as they enter the Slovene language both as individual lexemes or polylexemic units, while also exerting influence on and reshaping syntactic and word-formational patterns. The article illustrates this with examples.