Wanderwort

Template:Short description Template:Italic title A ( Template:Gloss, sometimes pluralized as , usually capitalized following German practice) is a word that has spread as a loanword among numerous languages and cultures, especially those that are far away from one another. As such, are a curiosity in historical linguistics and sociolinguistics within a wider study of language contact. At a sufficient time depth, it can be very difficult to establish in which language or language family a originated and into which it was borrowed.

Frequently, they are spread through trade networks, sometimes to describe a previously unfamiliar plant, animal or food.

Examples

Typical examples of are cannabis, sugar, ginger, copper, silver, cumin, mint, wine, and honey, some of which can be traced back to Bronze Age trade.

File:CamelWanderwörter.png

Four Wanderwörter with the meaning 'camel'. Extensive loaning has carried Semitic, Turkic, Indo-Iranian, and Chinese words for 'camel' throughout Africa and Eurasia.

Tea, with its Eurasian continental variant chai (both have entered English), is an example whose spread occurred relatively late in human history and is therefore fairly well understood: tea is from Hokkien Template:Translit, specifically Amoy dialect, from the Fujianese port of Xiamen, hence it is the maritime variant, while Template:Translit (whence chai) is used in Cantonese and Mandarin. Template:Crossref

Chocolate and tomato were both taken from Classical Nahuatl via Spanish into many different languages, although the specific origin of chocolate is obscure.

Farang, a term derived from the ethnonym Frank through Andalusian Arabic, refers to foreigners (typically white and European ones). From the above two languages, the word has been loaned into many languages spoken on or near the Indian Ocean, including Hindi, Thai, and Amharic, among others. It also existed in Russian in the form "" with the same meaning.

Kangaroo was taken from the Guugu Yimithirr word for the eastern grey kangaroo; it entered English through the records of James Cook's expedition of 1770 and through English to languages around the world.

Orange originated in a Dravidian language (likely Tamil, Telugu or Malayalam), and its likely path to English included, in order, Sanskrit, Persian, possibly Armenian, Arabic, Italian, and Old French. Template:Crossref

The words for 'horse' across many Eurasian languages seem to be related such as Mongolian (Template:Translit), Manchu (Template:Translit), Korean (Template:Translit), Japanese (Template:Translit), and Thai (Template:Translit), as well as Sino-Tibetan languages leading to Mandarin (Template:Translit), and Tibetan (Template:Translit). It is present in several Celtic and Germanic languages, whence Irish and English mare.