The Scale of Borrowability and the Scale of Necessity of English Loanwords in the Mongolian Language: A Study on the Usage of English Loanwords in the Mongolian Popular Podcast Ideree’s Podcast

Abstract

This thesis is a quantitative study on the scale of borrowability and the scale of necessity of English loanwords in 10 episodes of the Mongolian podcast Ideree’s Podcast. The main inspiration behind the study is the personal belief that the Mongolian younger generation is routinely using unnecessary loanwords. In addition to analyzing the linguistic aspect of the English loanwords, the research indicates some of the critical factors that influence the borrowability and the necessity of English loanwords in Mongolian, which hint at the reason for using English loanwords in Mongolian. The main method used in collecting data is recording the English loanwords and their recorded time. The loanwords and their translations (if translated in the podcast) have been registered in eleven appendices. The most important information is the used loanwords in the first ten appendices, while appendix 11 recorded the translated loanwords and their translations in the previous ten appendices. There are some clarifications included in the spreadsheet using special signs and different fonts, which simplifies data finding. The most notable section of findings used quantitative analysis to categorize the data into different groups based on the need of the study. The scale of borrowability of the English loanwords is relatively apparent than the scale of the necessity of the English loanwords. Some of the hardly measurable linguistic and nonlinguistic factors related to the critical definitions of the “necessity” in linguistic borrowing might be the reason behind this unclear result. Therefore, the terms “luxury” and “necessity” indicate whether the loanwords are translatable in ten target samples. As a result, the scale of borrowability of English loanwords in the Mongolian language corresponds to former research results on other languages. On the other hand, some of the loanwords are luxury and can be avoided considering the scale of necessity.