A collaborative project coordinated by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Linguistics (Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor), 2004-2009

The results of this project were published in two forms in 2009:

1. An online database: The World Loanword Database
   
   
2. A book publication:
   

   [Martin Haspelmath & Uri Tadmor]. Loanwords in the World's Languages: A Comparative Handbook. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1081 pp.
   [table of contents, publisher's book page, read online]

The initiative is presently continuing in the form of the World Loanword Series, coordinated by Anthony Grant and Kim Schulte.

These web pages are the old pages from the project, which is now completed. They are now superseded by the publications listed above. 

In this project, we studied lexical borrowing patterns in 41 languages from around the world. Each language was the responsibility of a single author, an expert of the language and what is known about its history and its contact languages. For each language, we assembled lexical data for a fixed list of 1460 meanings. The lexical meanings include those on the list for the Intercontinental Dictionary Series, another MPI-EVA initiative. 

In this way we hope to provide a systematic basis for claims about borrowability and borrowing likelihood, as well as about grammatical, social and cultural conditions for borrowing.

See also the following publication:

Uri Tadmor, Martin Haspelmath, and Bradley Taylor. 2010. Borrowability and the notion of basic vocabulary. Diachronica  27(2). 226-246 (special issue with the papers from the 2009 Swadesh Centennial Conference, edited by Anthony Grant and Søren Wichmann)