Putting languages into perspective: A comprehensive database of English words and their Croatian equivalents

Abstract

Numerous studies have addressed the issue of English words in the context of their adaptation, but there still exists the need for a systematic perspective on English words in terms of their number and frequency of appearance. This article will outline the procedure behind the compilation process of unadapted English words in the Croatian language with a comprehensive description of the final product – an open-access database of single- (SWE) and multi-word (MWE) English expressions extracted from Croatian web corpora (ENGRI and hrWaC) by means of computational-linguistic tools and manual extraction. The final version of the database contains 2,982 English words in their unadapted form (e.g. blockbuster), and 18 words which appear with English orthographic properties in combination with Croatian inflectional affixes (e.g. downloadati). Each SWE and MWE entry in the database is accompanied with frequencies of appearance in both corpora as well as its Croatian equivalent where available (29.58% of all entries are listed without an equivalent). The database serves as the first systematic representation of English words in Croatian and provides an indispensable tool for further research into the phenomenon while at the same time opening the door to a new line of research – cognitive processing of English words in Croatian.