Barbarisms

foreign words and expressions used in speech to describe realia, customs, and so forth of other peoples. Barbarisms may be incompletely assimilated by a language (semantically and sometimes even morphologically and syntactically). As a rule, they are used to express local color in designations of proper nouns (Jean, José), money (dollar, centime), posts and types of people (curé, mayor, gangster), details of everyday life, clothing, decoration, food, or titles (castanets, siuzane, redingote, sherbet, sir), and so on. They are also used to achieve a comic effect (“Avoue, don’t you have a connaissance with some sort of Frenchman?”—D. I. Fonvizin) and, in cases of foreign words, in the hope of displaying one’s education. Among barbarisms, exoticisms—descriptions of realia, usually taken from non-Indo-European languages such as giaour, aul, shalwar—are sometimes distinguished.