Introduction

The effect of all the borrowing meant that though English remained a Germanic language, it was in terms of vocabulary very much like the Romance descendants of Latin such as French, Italian and Spanish. A language has to cope with the accumulated knowledge of the human race and must expand its vocabulary to keep up with new discoveries as well as political and social changes. English has always made great use of compounding and affixation to form new words. The vocabulary of a language extends beyond what is found in the average dictionary. Besides slang words, the English language has also added many loan words to its vocabulary. As the colonial period came to an end in the twentieth century, there was much ‘ethnic’ immigration into English-speaking countries; with these immigrants came new varieties of ethnic food and their associated vocabulary.