Abstract: Some years ago, the French linguist J. Rey-Debove designed a theory of the process of
lexical borrowing in eight steps. The aim of this article is to confront Rey-Debove’s theory
with actual occurrences of English-language loans in German, taken from a real corpus.
We present our own classification of all the “alterity markers” found in a corpus during the
neological phase. This in fact validates the relevance of Rey-Debove’s theory, especially
in regard of the fundamental role played by autonymy, but on the other hand it also shows
up aspects of the theory that need to be completed. The general conclusion is that the theory of linear evolution during the neological phase simply cannot be validated.
