Wherever languages come into contact, their speakers borrow various items from one another (Weinreich, 1953/1967). Bilingual speakers, at any level, use words from different languages within the context of the dominant language. Borrowing words from a language different from one's mother tongue is a universal phenomenon of human communication and is related to codeswitching on the one hand and relexification on the other. Different semantic areas within the general vocabulary of a language reveal this effect at variegated levels (for references see, e.g. Bhatia & Ritchie, 2004).

Interlanguage contact (in many languages) is a social and cultural process often addressed by sociolinguists such as Fishman et al. (1977b), Haugen (1972), Higa (1979) and Maurais (1985). Three types of countries have been described regarding the contact between national languages and the common communication language

• Countries characterised by competing local cultures and languages that adopt the common communication language as a compromise. An example is India, where the struggle between Hindu, Urdu and Bengali led to the embracing of English as the language of the government and the social elite.

• Countries with ethnic subdivisions and problems regarding political unity, and lacking a national governmental tradition, where a common communication language is adopted as a symbol of national unity ('nationism', according to Fishman).

• Countries with a tradition of national language, in which a common communication language is adopted for certain functions to integrate political, economic and social modernisation ('nationalism': see, e.g. Fishman, 1971; Fishman et al., 1977b).

The purpose of the present chapter is to study some features of the English borrowings in Modern Hebrew at the beginning of the 21st century and the effect of English on Hebrew through borrowed vocabulary.