Loanwords from Indian Languages in English Documents from the Empire

Texts commonly referred to as ‘colonial’ and ‘post-colonial’ abound of loanwords from indigenous languages. From this perspective Days of the Raj—an anthology composed of extracts from letters, private documents, guides for English people, and many other materials deriving from the Archives of the Empire in India—represents a significant example. Many words of ndian origin appear in the extracts collected in this non-fiction book. The present paper aims to focus on these borrowings and neologisms dividing them according to their cultural relevance in their respective semantic fields and comparing them to the definitions given in the dictionary known as Hobson-Jobson, a glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, printed in 1886. The evidence shows that these Anglo-Indian words had often the function to create a division between the supposed superior culture of the colonizer and the inferior world of the colonized.