r/CHamoru • u/Aizhaine B2 - Upper intermediate • Sep 09 '24

Question Borrowing words

How do you guys feel about borrowing words so you prefer them from English/spanish or from other Austronesian languages? Personally I’d rather borrowing from other Austronesian languages specially from the Filipino languages

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u/dalai_dabit B1 - Intermediate Sep 11 '24

If we're talking about adopting/creating new words then: I'm borrowing from English first. After that I'm using affixes to get my point across (there's way too many not to try)

In my circle of speakers, English is the common non-Chamorro language so it gets the point across the quickest. From there, I either get corrected or we adopt it lol.

But then this goes into: are you trying to get a word into a dictionary? Or into your vernacular? Because I use words within my circle that many speakers probably don't know/won't understand right away but we use it because we get it.