Judit Szitó, Viktória Albert: Beer-lak, Foodejó, Rockburger: Creative borrowing from English

Article

The study undertakes the analysis of three creative Hungarian gastrobusiness names selected from online sources, based on their being at least partially borrowed from English. Potential methods and outcomes are surveyed, including Anglicism and neologism research. It is demonstrated that orthography and phonology is crucial in understanding creative hybrids, and phonological variation also plays a role in the adaptation of more established loans. Some pragmatic aspects of these names are also discussed, such as the reason for using English, and the type and amount of English knowledge required to understand the names. Finally, the assumptions are tested on 21 volunteers, requested to pronounce the names. Results indicate that monolinguals and bilinguals differ in their appreciation of the selected creatively misspelled English-Hungarian names and in their pronunciation varieties of the more established loans, but they are nearly equally successful in their attempts to pronounce them.