The Role of Popular Culture in Language Borrowing

This work proposes that popular culture often derives from the privi­leged upper classes and that popular culture established by the elite has played an important role in linguistic exchange throughout history between French and English. Focusing on the time periods 1066 AD to 1500 AD and the twentieth and twenty first centuries it describes the manner of exchange and development of French and English lexicons and analyzes in detail the histories of one French word and one English word. Additionally the examples given in this thesis illustrate the flow of popular culture from the high-ranking and powerful mem­bers of society to the common people.This work provides a good starting point for historians and linguists wishing to better understand the importance of culture in language development and the origins of linguistic trends.