Today I want to talk about where words come from, and in particular about words that one language borrows from another.

English is an enormous borrower. A large share of its vocabulary came from French and Latin, but closer to home, the English spoken in California and the Southwest picked up hundreds of words from Spanish. Canyon, patio, rodeo and mesa all arrived this way, and most people who use them every day have no idea they were ever borrowed.

Linguists point out that borrowing usually happens for one of two reasons. The first is need. Speakers meet something new and take its name from the people who already had one. English speakers who came west found landforms and ranching practices their language had no words for, so they took the Spanish ones.

The second reason is prestige. Speakers sometimes borrow a word even when they already have one, because the other language is linked with wealth, power or fashion. That is part of why English has both the everyday word ask and the more formal word inquire, which came from French.

Borrowed words rarely stay the same. Their sounds shift to fit the new language, and their meanings often narrow. In Spanish, rodeo can mean a cattle roundup, or simply going the long way around. In English it usually names one kind of public competition.

And borrowing flows in both directions. Spanish speakers in the United States use words like parquear, meaning to park a car, which came from English. Some people treat words like that as mistakes. Linguists see them as evidence of something every living language does whenever its speakers come into contact with another.