Whether used in journalist writings or in fiction,
most of these nonce borrowings are not listed in American or British desk dictionaries,
and constitute a group distinct from the corpus in Cannon (1988). Used infrequently and
restricted to bilingual speakers, nonce borrowings mark the beginning of ‘the borrowing
process – from isolated, one-time usage of a copied form in normal bilingual speech to
its complete acceptance and integration into the recipient system’ (Field 2002: 9). This
means that some of the words investigated by Gao, Yang, and Zhang may enter general
English and perhaps even other nativized varieties. Despite the value of their exploration
of such nonce borrowings, this line of research clearly complements rather than builds
on Cannon’s study. There seem to have been no recent studies of Chinese borrowings in
general English that appear in multiple desk dictionaries.