Words of foreign origin are referred to as borrowed words or loanwords. A loanword is usually imported to Chinese by phonetic transliteration if a translation is not easily available. Semantic transliteration is seen as a good tradition in introducing foreign words to Chinese. Not only does it preserve how a word sounds in the source language, it also carries forward the word's original semanti...

This article introduces the menu task, which can be used to elicit infrequent sounds such as loan phonemes that only occur in a restricted set of words. The menu task is similar to the well-known map task and involves the interaction of two participants to create a menu on the basis of a list of words (all referring to food). This new task was used to obtain realizations of loanwords with a voi...

There is great variation in whether foreign sounds in loanwords are adapted or retained. Importantly, the retention of foreign sounds can lead to a sound change in the language. We propose that social factors influence the likelihood of loanword sound adaptation, and use this case to introduce a novel experimental paradigm for studying language change that captures the role of social factors. S...