Editing Language contact (section)

=== Borrowing of vocabulary items ===
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The most common way that languages influence each other is the exchange of words. Much is made about the contemporary borrowing of [[English language|English]] words into other languages, but this phenomenon is not new, and it is not very large by historical standards. The large-scale importation of words from [[Latin]], [[French language|French]] and other languages into English in the 16th and the 17th centuries was more significant.

Some languages have borrowed so much that they have become scarcely recognisable. [[Armenian language|Armenian]] borrowed so many words from [[Iranian languages]], for example, that it was at first considered a divergent branch of the [[Indo-Iranian languages]] and was not recognised as an independent branch of the [[Indo-European languages]] for many decades.<ref>Waterman, John (1976). ''A History of the German Language''. University of Washington Press, p. 4</ref><ref>{{cite book |author=Robin Meyer |title=Iranian Syntax in Classical Armenian: The Armenian Perfect and Other Cases of Pattern Replication |url=https://academic.oup.com/book/55800 |isbn=9780191885839 |year=2024 |publisher=[[Oxford University Press]]}}</ref>