История миграции в языке: как слова отражают социальные изменения

THIS column is the second of a three-part series drawn from a keynote lecture, “Meaning on the Move: Migration, Lexicon and the Oxford English Dictionary,” which I delivered at the Intercultural Semantics conference at Aarhus University from Aug. 19 to 21, 2026, organized by professors Susana Fernández and Carsten Levisen. In my previous column, I argued that the words we use for people who cross borders are never entirely neutral. One person becomes an expatriate, another a migrant worker, another a global talent, and another an asylum seeker. These labels do more than describe movement; they reflect how societies classify, value and govern different kinds of mobility. The words themselves, however, also have histories. Their changing fortunes across time can reveal how migration itself has changed. One of the most revealing tools for seeing this is the Google Books Ngram Viewer, which traces how frequently words appear across millions of digitized English-language books over several centuries. For the keynote lecture from which this three-part series is drawn, I plotted four migration-related words — emigration, immigration, migration and refugee. The resulting graph does not simply show changing word frequencies. Read carefully, it offers something like an Anglophone textual history of international migration. The first pattern that stands out is the prominence of emigration during much of the 19th century. This makes historical sense. Britain, Ireland and other parts of Europe were then major sources of outward migration. Millions left for North America, Australia, New Zealand, and other settler societies, while colonial expansion carried English speakers across the globe. Within this historical context, English-language writers often viewed migration from the perspective of departure. People were emigrating. Over the 20th century, however, the balance begins to shift. The frequency of emigration levels off while immigration becomes increasingly prominent. The contrast between these two words is deceptively simple because they can describe exactly the same movement. If someone leaves the Philippines for Japan, that person is simultaneously an emigrant from the Philippine perspective and an immigrant from the Japanese perspective. The difference lies not in the movement itself but in the point of view from which it is described. That shift in perspective mirrors broader historical transformations in international migration. As Hein de Haas, Stephen Castles and Mark Miller (2020) argue, migration has become increasingly complex, multidirectional and interconnected. Major Anglophone societies such as the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and the United States gradually became less defined by outward settlement and more by inward migration. Britain offers perhaps the clearest example. The country that had once sent people across its empire increasingly became a destination for migrants from India, Pakistan, the Caribbean, Africa, and many other parts of the world. The vocabulary of English appears to register something of this historical reversal. A society that had long spoken about people leaving increasingly found itself speaking about people arriving. The trajectory of refugee tells a different story altogether. Unlike emigration and immigration, whose histories largely reflect changing perspectives on movement, refugee rises most noticeably during periods when forced displacement becomes a defining international concern. Wars, political upheaval, persecution, decolonization and humanitarian crises repeatedly brought refugees into public consciousness, and the word became increasingly central as international refugee protection developed during the 20th century. Here, the lexical history reflects not simply changing migration flows but changing global recognition of forced displacement as a distinct social and legal category. Perhaps the most striking development, however, is the rise of the broader word migration itself. From around the middle of the 20th century onward, its frequency increases dramatically, eventually overtaking the more directional terms emigration and immigration. This shift is particularly significant because migration does not require us to choose between departure and arrival. It accommodates both. As international mobility became more varied — encompassing labor migration, family reunification, student mobility, return migration, circular migration, and transnational lives spanning multiple countries — the broader concept of migration became increasingly capable of capturing this complexity. At this point, an important caution is necessary. Google Books is not the world. The corpus consists of English-language books, so the graph represents an Anglophone textual perspective rather than a neutral record of global migration. Nor can a rise in frequency prove that a particular migration event directly caused a word to become more common. What the graph does reveal is how English-speaking societies have increasingly written about migration from different historical vantage points. In that sense, the changing prominence of these four words reflects shifts not only in patterns of mobility but also in the ways mobility has been imagined, narrated and conceptualized within English. This reminds us that words have histories because societies have histories. As migration changes, so do the concepts through which people make sense of it. Yet frequency alone cannot tell us everything. It cannot explain where words came from, how their meanings expanded, why some labels acquired prestige while others became stigmatized, or how migration itself might have introduced entirely new linguistic resources into English. For those questions, we need a different kind of historical record. In the final part of this series, I turn to the Oxford English Dictionary and explore how the movement of people has also become the movement of words. As we shall see, migration has not only changed the way English talks about mobility — it has helped change English itself. Ariane Macalinga Borlongan is a public intellectual, language scholar, and migrant advocate. He is one of the leading researchers on English in the Philippines and one of the pioneers of migration linguistics. He is the youngest to earn a doctorate in linguistics, at age 23, from De La Salle University, and has had several teaching and research positions in Germany, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Poland and Singapore. He is currently an associate professor of sociolinguistics at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. One person becomes an expatriate, another a migrant worker, another a global talent, and another an asylum seeker. These labels do more than describe movement; they reflect how societies classify, value and govern different kinds of mobility. The words themselves, however, also have histories. Their changing fortunes across time can reveal how migration itself has changed. One of the most revealing tools for seeing this is the Google Books Ngram Viewer, which traces how frequently words appear across millions of digitized English-language books over several centuries. For the keynote lecture from which this three-part series is drawn, I plotted four migration-related words — emigration, immigration, migration and refugee. The resulting graph does not simply show changing word frequencies. Read carefully, it offers something like an Anglophone textual history of international migration. The first pattern that stands out is the prominence of emigration during much of the 19th century. This makes historical sense. Britain, Ireland and other parts of Europe were then major sources of outward migration. Millions left for North America, Australia, New Zealand, and other settler societies, while colonial expansion carried English speakers across the globe. Within this historical context, English-language writers often viewed migration from the perspective of departure. People were emigrating. Over the 20th century, however, the balance begins to shift. The frequency of emigration levels off while immigration becomes increasingly prominent. The contrast between these two words is deceptively simple because they can describe exactly the same movement. If someone leaves the Philippines for Japan, that person is simultaneously an emigrant from the Philippine perspective and an immigrant from the Japanese perspective. The difference lies not in the movement itself but in the point of view from which it is described. That shift in perspective mirrors broader historical transformations in international migration. As Hein de Haas, Stephen Castles and Mark Miller (2020) argue, migration has become increasingly complex, multidirectional and interconnected. Major Anglophone societies such as the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and the United States gradually became less defined by outward settlement and more by inward migration. Britain offers perhaps the clearest example. The country that had once sent people across its empire increasingly became a destination for migrants from India, Pakistan, the Caribbean, Africa, and many other parts of the world. The vocabulary of English appears to register something of this historical reversal. A society that had long spoken about people leaving increasingly found itself speaking about people arriving. The trajectory of refugee tells a different story altogether. Unlike emigration and immigration, whose histories largely reflect changing perspectives on movement, refugee rises most noticeably during periods when forced displacement becomes a defining international concern. Wars, political upheaval, persecution, decolonization and humanitarian crises repeatedly brought refugees into public consciousness, and the word became increasingly central as international refugee protection developed during the 20th century. Here, the lexical history reflects not simply changing migration flows but changing global recognition of forced displacement as a distinct social and legal category. Perhaps the most striking development, however, is the rise of the broader word migration itself. From around the middle of the 20th century onward, its frequency increases dramatically, eventually overtaking the more directional terms emigration and immigration. This shift is particularly significant because migration does not require us to choose between departure and arrival. It accommodates both. As international mobility became more varied — encompassing labor migration, family reunification, student mobility, return migration, circular migration, and transnational lives spanning multiple countries — the broader concept of migration became increasingly capable of capturing this complexity. At this point, an important caution is necessary. Google Books is not the world. The corpus consists of English-language books, so the graph represents an Anglophone textual perspective rather than a neutral record of global migration. Nor can a rise in frequency prove that a particular migration event directly caused a word to become more common. What the graph does reveal is how English-speaking societies have increasingly written about migration from different historical vantage points. In that sense, the changing prominence of these four words reflects shifts not only in patterns of mobility but also in the ways mobility has been imagined, narrated and conceptualized within English. This reminds us that words have histories because societies have histories. As migration changes, so do the concepts through which people make sense of it. Yet frequency alone cannot tell us everything. It cannot explain where words came from, how their meanings expanded, why some labels acquired prestige while others became stigmatized, or how migration itself might have introduced entirely new linguistic resources into English. For those questions, we need a different kind of historical record. In the final part of this series, I turn to the Oxford English Dictionary and explore how the movement of people has also become the movement of words. As we shall see, migration has not only changed the way English talks about mobility — it has helped change English itself. Ariane Macalinga Borlongan is a public intellectual, language scholar, and migrant advocate. He is one of the leading researchers on English in the Philippines and one of the pioneers of migration linguistics. He is the youngest to earn a doctorate in linguistics, at age 23, from De La Salle University, and has had several teaching and research positions in Germany, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Poland and Singapore. He is currently an associate professor of sociolinguistics at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.