Myths and facts about loanword development S HANA P OPLACK AND N ATHALIE D ION University of Ottawa ABSTRACT This study traces the diachronic trajectory and synchronic behavior of English-origin items in Quebec French over a real-time period of 61 years. We test three standard assumptions about such foreign incorporations: (1) they increase in frequency; (2) they originate as code-switches and are gradually integrated into recipient-language grammar; and (3) the processes underlying code-switching and borrowing are the same. Results do not support the assumptions. Few other-language items persist, let alone increase. Linguistic integration is abrupt, not gradual. Speakers consistently distinguish lone other-language items from multiword fragments on each of five linguistic diagnostics tested. They borrow the former, and code-switch the latter. Code-switches are not converted into borrowings; instead the decision to code-switch or borrow is made at the moment the other-language item is accessed. We explore the implications of these findings for understanding the processes by which other-language incorporations achieve the status of native items and their consequences for theories of code-switching and borrowing. The study of language contact abounds with ideas about how lexical items from one language enter another, and how they are eventually converted into full-fledged native words. Many scholars believe that these items are taken from a donor language “as is,” that is, code-switched, but by virtue of being repeated often and widely enough, gradually assume more and more characteristics of the recipient language until they eventually become indistinguishable from it—bona fide loanwords (e.g., Myers-Scotton, 2002; Thomason, 2003; Van Coetsem, 2000). This is a reasonable scenario, and it accords well with a view of language change as gradual. On the other hand, it is also claimed that at any given point in time, it is impossible to distinguish code-switched from borrowed elements. Code-switches composed of a single word (coincidentally the canonical unit of both established loanwords and nonce borrowings) are the most contentious in this regard, but blanket refusals to differentiate all kinds of code-switches, single- and multiword, from borrowed forms persist. Some argue that previous attempts to make such a distinction must fail because the methodology is lacking The research reported here was generously funded by grants to Poplack from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Poplack holds a Canada Research Chair (I) in Linguistics. We are grateful to audiences at Pennsylvania State Universityand the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies for comments that substantially improved this study, and to Kimberly Miller, Molly Love, and Mystique Lacelle, of the Universityof Ottawa Sociolinguistics Laboratory, for their participation in extracting, coding, and tabulating the data. 279 Language Variation and Change, 24 (2012), 279–315. © Cambridge University Press, 2012 0954-3945/12 $16.00 doi:10.1017/S095439451200018X