Introduction

In this chapter I have made a systematic corpus-based study to show how the vocabulary of modern Bengali language is full of a large number of new English words and terms that have recently crept into the Bengali vocabulary to make room for new concepts, items, and ideas. This study can also show that these newly borrowed words and terms have made exiting equivalent words and terms of Bengali functionally redundant. I have made an empirical attempt to explore how the vocabulary of the present Bengali language is undergoing linguistic metamorphosis at the lexical level by drawing heavily from the English vocabulary as a result of several linguistic and extralinguistic factors, and how new English general words, as well as scientific and technical terms, are being incorporated into the Bengali language through various methods of naturalization.

I have presented here some of the findings, which I have obtained from his analysis of a Bengali corpus of prose texts (1981–1995) as well as from a lexical database manually compiled from various types of modern Bengali prose texts. In a systematic way I have shown how naturalization is taking place in Bengali vocabulary with complex operation of linguistic processes such as adoption and adaptation at lexical, phonological, and morphological levels. This pilot study plants the seeds for further investigation into this area with some large databases compiled from heterogeneous texts of the modern Bengali language.

In theory, naturalization is an ongoing process by which various linguistic items of a language are gradually naturalized or nativized in another language by means of applying various morpho-phonological processes, which are quite active in the borrower language. Naturalization becomes active in a language when a need arises for increasing the stock of vocabulary for addressing various linguistic and non-linguistic needs of the language users.

The conditions and the motivations of naturalization are almost similar to those observed in the case of lexical borrowing (Hockett, 1958).