A Survey of Internationalisms between Slovene and English

The major aim of the survey here reported was to establish whether internationalisms, words which are used internationally, may be used by Slovene and English language users as lexical items with a total meaning overlap. For the purpose of the study, a corpus comprising 895 Slovene lexical items beginning with the letter L and their English-language counterparts was created. The lexical items in the corpus were then compared to verify their similarities in meaning, both on the conceptual, connotational, collocational and stylistic levels, and in form, both in terms of their morphological structure, pronunciation and orthography. The study showed that only a limited number of internationalisms between Slovene and English share enough semantic, morphological, phonetic and orthographic characteristics to be used in the foreign language without falling into the trap of committing interlingual errors. With most of the analysed lexical pairs, differences in meaning, morphological structure, pronunciation and/or spelling could be observed. Often, lexical pairs differed on more than one level. Semantic false friends, for example, may differ in meaning, morphology, pronunciation and spelling. With morphological false friends, the meanings of the lexemes are the same - the lexical pairs would differ in their morphological structure. Often, morphological differences would be accompanied by phonological and orthographical divergences as well. Finally, while with phonological false friends differences in pronunciation may be supported also by different spelling, divergences among orthographical false friends are restricted to orthography. Although it is true that internationalisms are words which are used internationally, it has been proven that they are not used in the same way in the Slovene-English language pair. Yet, it is their apparent similarities that often lead us to believe that they share their meaning and linguistic behaviour, thus inducing us to commit interlingual errors of false-friend type.