Europeans brought new concepts, ideas and technologies with them that had not existed before colonialism in Zimbabwe. This led Shona and other indigenous languages (such as Ndebele, Venda, Nambya, Kalanga) to absorb a substantial new vocabulary into their lexicons. Speakers of these languages have been creating terms to cope with the new concepts through various strategies. This article aims at studying the motivation of Shona speakers to prefer borrowed words where both Shona and the English terms are available. Results of the research for this study show that Shona speakers seem to prefer English loanwords owing to issues such as prestige and elitism, shortness and precision, explicitness, expressiveness, currency of term, gap-filling and language modernisation. In addition, an unfavourable language policy in Zimbabwe helps to promote the use of English in all spheres of life, thereby undermining the development of Shona. This study is qualitative in nature, and it adopts a descriptive approach in analysing the data gathered through structured and oral interviews, questionnaires and secondary sources. The major contribution of this study is the illustration of how borrowing can be used to benefit the indigenous language development initiatives and to help language policy planners in Zimbabwe.

中文翻译：

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语言变化的必然性：绍纳语使用者借用英语术语的动机

欧洲人带来了津巴布韦殖民主义之前就没有的新概念，思想和技术。这导致绍纳语和其他土著语言（例如Ndebele，Venda，Nambya，Kalanga）将大量新词汇吸收到其词典中。这些语言的使用者一直在通过各种策略来创建术语以应对新概念。本文旨在研究使用绍纳语和英语术语的绍纳语使用者偏向借用单词的动机。这项研究的研究结果表明，由于声望和名流，简短和准确，明晰，表达力强，术语通俗，填补空白和语言现代化等问题，绍纳语使用者似乎更喜欢英语借词。此外，津巴布韦的不利语言政策有助于在生活的各个方面促进英语的使用，从而破坏了绍纳语的发展。这项研究本质上是定性的，它采用描述性方法来分析通过结构化和口头访谈，问卷和次要来源收集的数据。这项研究的主要贡献是说明了如何利用借贷来使津巴布韦的土著语言发展计划受益并帮助语言政策规划人员。