False friend

The term was introduced by a French book, Les faux amis: ou, Les trahisons du vocabulaire anglais (False friends, or, the betrayals of English vocabulary), published in 1928.

As well as producing completely false friends, the use of loanwords often results in the use of a word in a restricted context, which may then develop new meanings not found in the original language.

For example, angst means 'fear' in a general sense (as well as 'anxiety') in German, but when it was borrowed into English in the context of psychology, its meaning was restricted to a particular type of fear described as "a neurotic feeling of anxiety and depression".

[3][4] The origin of the term is as a shortened version of the expression "false friend of a translator", the English translation of a French expression (French: faux amis du traducteur) introduced by Maxime Kœssler and Jules Derocquigny in their 1928 book,[5] with a sequel, Autres Mots anglais perfides.

[9] The word friend itself has cognates in the other Germanic languages, but the Scandinavian ones (like Swedish frände, Danish frænde) predominantly mean 'relative'.

A high level of lexical similarity exists between German and Dutch,[10] but shifts in meaning of words with a shared etymology have in some instances resulted in 'bi-directional false friends':[11][12] Note that die See means 'sea', and thus is not a false friend.

of salām "good health") was borrowed directly into Malay/Indonesian selamat "safe, secure, whole".

However, the Swedish original meaning of 'calm' is retained in some related words such as ro 'calmness', and orolig 'worrisome, anxious', literally 'un-calm'.

[16][17] In bilingual situations, false friends often result in a semantic change—a real new meaning that is then commonly used in a language.