The influence of English on Serbian sports terminology

Abstract

In the light of the fact that nowadays the source language of sports terminology is English, the aim of this paper is to provide an exhaustive analysis of the influence of English on term formation processes in Serbian sports terminology. The analysis, based on the corpus of sports terms compiled from several glossaries and dictionaries, has indicated that English-Serbian language contacts in the field of sport are not only limited to the transfer of new forms with their inherent semantic content from English into Serbian, but that they also include taking over new English-based meanings, clippings and compound forms with non-inflectional modifiers. The findings indicate that the number of English borrowings could be lower than already stated if the creation of new terms was immediately followed by the process of standardisation which, from the aspect of language contacts, is a matter of linguistics rather than sport.