For example, languages such as Greek, Latin, German, Russian, and English are frequent loan-givers in history, depending on their socio-cultural and economic power of various periods. Prestige is an external cause, where languages of more powerful cultural spheres become sources for loans in other languages. Need is an internal cause, emerging out of a changing socio-cultural environment.
In the literature, the causalities of lexical borrowing are identified as either need This captures a central function of loans: they primarily deal with items, e.g., artefacts, ideas, or notions, which in a language contact situation are impacted by socio-cultural change. Of all lexical loans, nouns are by far the most frequent, followed by adjectives, adverbs, and verbs.
Loans may also occur in the complementary domain of function words, but these constitute a minority of borrowings. (e.g., nouns, verbs) is at the centre of lexical borrowing. Loans between languages, on the other hand, can normally be secured by chronology of sound changes, also in history and prehistory. However, the presence or impact of substrate interference is more problematic to identify, in particular if we move back into history and prehistory. These two phenomena are connected but not necessarily accompanying each other. There is a rich literature in the area of lexical borrowing, as well as in the adjacent domain of substrate interference. Lexical borrowing is a topic of major interest in several fields of linguistics, including language contact, historical linguistics, and language typology. In conclusion, we observe that need and prestige compete as causes of lexical borrowing. The process is not constant over time, with a larger inequality during the ancient and modern periods, but this result may depend on the status of the data (non-prestigious languages often remain unattested). We also conclude that language prestige is not correlated with borrowability in general (all languages borrow, independently of prestige), but prestige predicts the directionality of borrowing, from a more prestigious language to a less prestigious one. We conclude that the borrowability of concepts increases with increasing mobility (nature), and with increased labour intensity and "distance-from-hearth" (culture). Secondly, to test prestige, we use a power ranking of languages by their socio-cultural status. Firstly, to test need, we use a cultural ranking of concepts by their mobility (of nature items) or their labour intensity and "distance-from-hearth" (of culture items). To test the causality of borrowing, we use two different ranks. We compare our results to those of a global sample and observe that our rates are generally lower, but that the rates between the samples are significantly correlated.
We observe that the rates of borrowing are highly variable among concepts, lexical domains, languages, language families, and time periods. To avoid loans for newly introduced concepts in languages, we use a list of lexical concepts that have been in use at least since the Chalcolithic (4000-3000 BCE). We use a cognacy-coded dataset, which identifies loan events including a source and a target language. We investigate lexical loans in a dataset of 104 concepts in 115 Eurasian languages from 7 families occupying a coherent contact area of the Eurasian landmass, of which Indo-European languages from various periods constitute a majority. Linguists describe two causalities for borrowing: need, i.e., the internal pressure of borrowing a new term for a concept in the language, and prestige, i.e., the external pressure of borrowing a term from a more prestigious language. Languages typically borrow words when a new concept is introduced, but languages may also borrow a new word for an already existing concept. Some languages are more prone to borrowing, while others borrow less, and different domains of the vocabulary are unequally susceptible to borrowing. All languages borrow words from other languages.