Adaptation of Anglicisms in Polish and Czech

Method

The general premise of the method applied is simple: the more assimilated a loanword is, the higher score it should receive. The total score assigned to a given word is its adaptation measure, and the total score of all investigated words of a given language is the loanword adaptability measure of the language in question.

The idea that the degree of loanword adaptation can be expressed quantitatively is only natural, although the details of scoring make it rather complicated. In this investigation, sub-scores were assigned to words in a number of categories – including their spelling, pronunciation and morphology – thus making it possible to compare the degree of loanword adaptation in Polish and Czech in each category independently. The scoring rules were designed to balance the different aspects of loanword adaptation and to take the specific structural features of the languages compared into account.