This volume was conceived to study the determinants of and motives for contemporary lexical borrowing from English, the world's lingua franca, which since the second half of the 20th century has been playing an increasingly vital role in global politics, economy and culture and enjoys exceptionally high prestige. The foregoing chapters analysed the penetration of English loan words, mainly from American English, in 12 languages representing a wide variety of language families, political systems, economic developmental stages and historical relations with the English language and the Anglo-American world. In all of the countries under discussion (except for India to some extent), English remains a foreign language and does not enter the informal realm of full usage in private life, although it exerts an influence in the sphere of borrowed lexicon and is used to various degrees in codeswitching.

The process of borrowing words from English can be considered at least from two viewpoints: a psycholinguistic angle, reflecting the needs of individuals, and a sociolinguistic angle, reflecting the needs of communities. Personal attitudes to English vocabulary are among the psycholinguistic factors that affect and modify the individual's motivation for or against borrowing from it, whereas communal attitudes represent sociolinguistic aspects of language development through borrowing. Both are affected by linguistic and non-linguistic factors. Linguistic factors include all the structural elements of the examined languages, that is, elements and linguistic rules which are similar to or differ from the English ones. Non-linguistic factors, such as those related to economics and politics, exert their influence in various manners, according to the specific political and social structures in each language community.

Each language has its own seasoning of the above ingredients, including a unique history and contacts with a particular set of foreign languages. In Ch. 1 we divided these needs into three classes of elements that form the borrowing phenomenon: motives, determinants and media.