xenism

plural xenisms

1. human sciencesA word used in utterances of a language but generally marked as foreign.

   My objective was to collect all loanwords, such that this work is as complete as possible, though some words may not be commonly used by speakers of a given language that seem to be pure Arabic xenisms (see Swahili hamsa ‘five’ < ḫamsa 841).

   2020 November 30, Sergio Baldi, Dictionary of Arabic Loanwords in the Languages of Central and East Africa (Handbuch der Orientalistik; Erste Abteilung: Der Nahe und der Mittlere Osten; 145), Leiden • Boston: Brill, →ISBN, page 5

   1 more example

   The first stage is when a word from one language is used in an utterance of another language in order to create a somewhat exotic effect. At this stage, the word is not a borrowing, but rather what they term a xenism. An example of a xenism used in an English sentence would be At the harbour, we went for a sail in a gulet, where gulet is the word for a type of Turkish sail boat, which has no real equivalent in English.

   2013, Mari Jones, Ishtla Singh, Exploring Language Change, Taylor & Francis, published 2005, →ISBN, page 34