This chapter discusses the growing effect of borrowing on the word formation of Titsch and Toitschu, two Walser German varieties spoken in Northwestern Italy. Even if both communities of speakers are surrounded by a Romance-speaking area, the two varieties display strikingly different results due to distinct histories of contact.

The chapter considers the case of verb borrowing and the collapse of the stratal condition constraining certain word formation rules to apply only to non-native bases in Toitschu, the development in both varieties of a productive class of action nominals unknown to Modern Standard German and the emergence in Toitschu of phrasal verbs linked to the more general syntactic remodelling sustained by this variety. The chapter is organised as follows: after the introduction, section 2 briefly introduces the Walser communities, while section 3 discusses the issue of lexical strata in these varieties largely exposed to contact. In section 4 one case of borrowing is presented which shows how a derivational paradigm can be enlarged in a creative way; section 5 shows how far the contact can go when basic design features of a language are involved, while the final section 6 draws the conclusion.

A typology of borrowing phenomena

A common truism says that the presence of foreign elements within a language is due to language contact, which inevitably takes place in bi- or multilinguals. However, the latter normally form only a (small) subset of a linguistic community, from which the foreign elements subsequently spread across the whole community. In fact, language contact is highly sensitive to, among other factors, the intensity of the contact, the number of bilinguals in a community and the prestige of the contact language.

Another widespread truism is that language contact normally affects the lexicon to a stronger degree than the other components of the grammar. As for word formation and the lexicon, loan material is generally argued to be organised in different strata constraining the domain of application of certain word formation rules to bases belonging to a specific stratum and usually opposing native and non-native morphemes, which broadly reflect the origin of the word. For instance, German nouns ending with a full vowel are normally loans and take -s in the plural: Kanu (‘canoe’) / Kanus, Kotau (‘kowtow’) / Kotaus, etc. (cf. Gaeta 2008 for a survey).