Lexical borrowing in Korean: a diachronic approach based on a corpus analysis

Abstract Loanwords are lexical terms borrowed from foreign languages by transliterating the original sound of the borrowed words with the recipient language’s consonants and vowels. This paper focuses on lexical borrowing in the Korean language from a diachronic perspective. Based on approximately 9,500 Korean loanwords extracted from a corpus of women’s magazine articles of residential sections (the Korean Contemporary Residential Culture Corpus), we investigated the alteration of loanword usage from 1970 to 2015. Having introduced our definition of Korean loanwords in phonological and morphological terms, we performed statistical analysis particularly with type/token frequency and cultural/core loanwords, along with semantic analysis with Period Representative Loanword (PRL). We argue that, in addition to its gradual and rapid increase over time, Korean loanword usage underwent a remarkable evolution in the 1990s.