Xorijiy lingvistika va lingvodidaktika –
Зарубежная лингвистика и
лингводидактика – Foreign
Linguistics and Linguodidactics
Journal home page:
https://inscience.uz/index.php/foreign-linguistics
The roots of barbarisms in Harry Potter: language
borrowing and archaic usage
Juraali SOLIJONOV
1
Termez State Pedagogical Institute
ARTICLE INFO
ABSTRACT
Article history:
Received December 2024
Received in revised form
10 January 2025
Accepted 25 January 2025
Available online
25 February 2025
J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series showcases a rich tapestry
of language that is remarkable for its use of barbarisms – words
and expressions outside the norms of contemporary English.
Rowling's inventive use of language has been key to conjuring
the fantasy world of the Potterverse, and many of her coined or
revived terms have seeped into real-world usage. In linguistic
terms, a "barbarism" traditionally refers to non-standard or
foreign-influenced language, for example, borrowed words,
archaic terms, slang or hybrids that purists might consider
improper.
2181-3701/© 2024 in Science LLC.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47689/2181-3701-vol3-iss2
This is an open-access article under the Attribution 4.0 International
(CC BY 4.0) license (
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.ru
Keywords:
English-Uzbek,
language borrowing,
archaic usage,
linguistic invention,
neologisms,
etymology,
lexical creativity,
fantasy lexicon,
barbarisms,
magical terminology.
Garri Potter asarida barbarizmlar: o‘zlashmalar va
arxaizmlar
ANNOTATSIYA
Kalit so‘zlar:
Inglizcha-o‘zbekcha til
o‘zlashtirish,
arxaik qo‘llanish,
lingvistik ixtiro,
neologizmlar,
etimologiya,
leksik ijodkorlik,
fantaziya,
leksikoni,
barbarizmlar,
sehrli terminologiya.
J.K. Roulingning Garri Potter seriyasi tilning boy manzarasini
aks ettiradi, ayniqsa zamonaviy ingliz tilining me’yorlaridan
tashqarida bo‘lgan barbarizmlar – o‘ziga xos so‘z va iboralar
orqali ajralib turadi. Roulingning tilni ijodiy qo‘llashi Potter
olamini yaratishda asosiy rol o‘ynagan va uning ko‘plab ixtiro
qilingan yoki qayta tiklangan so‘zlari real dunyo tiliga ham kirib
kelgan. Lingvistik nuqtayi nazardan, “barbarizm” an’anaviy
ravishda nostandart yoki chet tillar ta’sirida shakllangan til
birliklarini anglatadi, masalan, o‘zlashgan so‘zlar, arxaik
iboralar, jargon yoki sof tilshunoslar noto‘g‘ri deb hisoblaydigan
gibrid shakllar.
1
Termez State Pedagogical Institute.
Xorijiy lingvistika va lingvodidaktika – Зарубежная лингвистика
и лингводидактика – Foreign Linguistics and Linguodidactics
Special Issue –2 (2025) / ISSN 2181-3701
124
Истоки варваризмов в «Гарри Поттере»: языковые
заимствования и архаичные выражения
АННОТАЦИЯ
Ключевые слова:
Английский-узбекский,
заимствование слов,
архаичное употребление,
языковое
изобретательство,
неологизмы,
этимология,
лексическое творчество,
лексика фэнтези,
варваризмы,
магическая терминология.
Серия «Гарри Поттер» Дж. К. Роулинг демонстрирует
богатую
языковую
палитру,
примечательную
использованием варваризмов – слов и выражений,
выходящих за рамки норм современного английского
языка. Изобретательное применение языка стало
ключевым элементом в создании фантастического мира
Поттерианы, и многие придуманные или возрождённые
термины
вошли
в
реальное
употребление.
С
лингвистической точки зрения «варваризм» традиционно
относится к нестандартным или заимствованным
языковым элементам, таким как иностранные слова,
архаизмы, сленг или гибридные формы, которые пуристы
могут считать неправильными.
INTRODUCTION
Rowling’s writing exhibits a
love of language
, brimming with creative wordplay
and eclectic vocabulary. Even as the Harry Potter story captured millions' imaginations, it
subtly expanded their lexicon. Generations of young readers (and their parents)
encountered unusual words in these pages – from pseudo-Latin incantations to old-
fashioned British slang – and learned to understand them through context and repetition.
Indeed, the series’ phenomenal popularity (over 500 million copies sold globally) has
meant that many previously obscure words have found a new life in everyday speech.
METHODOLOGY AND RESEARCH
One striking feature of Rowling’s language is her extensive
borrowing from
classical and foreign languages
to name the magical phenomena of her world. The use
of Latinate spells and mottoes is especially prominent, lending an aura of antiquity and
scholarly gravitas to wizarding life. In
Harry Potter
, magic is often conducted in Latin.
Many incantations are actual Latin words or close approximations, which makes the
magical
verbal charms
both exotic and intuitively understandable. For instance,
Accio
, the
summoning charm, literally means “I summon” in Latin, transparently conveying its
function. Likewise,
Lumos
(from Latin
lumen
, light) produces light, and
Nox
(Latin for
night) douses it, pairing ancient language with practical meaning. Other spells combine
Latin roots into evocative hybrids:
Expelliarmus
, the disarming spell that
expels
an
opponent’s weapon, is formed from
expello
(“I drive out”) and
arma
(“arms, weapons”).
Rowling even uses bits of mock-Latin – sometimes called “dog Latin” – to keep the spell
lexicon consistent; for example,
Expecto Patronum
(“I await a guardian”) and
Finite
Incantatem
(“end the spell”) sound like solemn Latin formulas, even if not all are strict
grammatical Latin.
DISCUSSION
Beyond Latin, Rowling’s
use of foreign languages and historical allusions
extends to character and place names, enriching the narrative with hidden meanings.
A salient example is the arch-villain’s name,
Lord
Voldemort
. Though it strikes fear on
the page, the name itself carries a clue to his nature when deconstructed in French:
vol de
Xorijiy lingvistika va lingvodidaktika – Зарубежная лингвистика
и лингводидактика – Foreign Linguistics and Linguodidactics
Special Issue –2 (2025) / ISSN 2181-3701
125
mort
translates to “flight of death” or “theft of death”. Both interpretations resonate with
Voldemort’s storyline – he is a wizard fixated on escaping death (fleeing from mortality)
and who achieves this by tearing apart others’ souls and lives (a figurative theft of others’
life or death). Such multilingual wordplay adds literary depth; a knowledgeable reader
recognizes the irony that the “Dark Lord” who refuses to die has a name built on the
concept of death. Rowling similarly mined French for the aristocratic surname
Malfoy
–
deriving it from
mal foi
, meaning “bad faith” – to suggest the family’s treacherous,
untrustworthy nature. Fittingly, the Malfoy clan is depicted as sly and duplicitous, and
their
motto
might as well be “bad faith” given their betrayals. The Malfoys’ first names,
too, have Latin roots that slyly comment on their characters. The patriarch
Lucius
bears a
name originating from Latin
lux
, meaning “light” – an ironic choice for a dark wizard and
Death Eater, but one that evokes the ancient Roman world (many Roman nobles were
named Lucius, including famous statesmen). His son
Draco
literally means “dragon” in
Latin, hinting at the emblazoned serpent symbol of Slytherin House and Draco’s
combative temperament. Perhaps most striking is the moniker of Draco’s ruthless aunt
Bellatrix Lestrange
.
Bellatrix
is Latin for “female warrior,” and indeed Bellatrix is one of
Voldemort’s most dangerous lieutenants, a woman warrior in service of evil.
(Not coincidentally, Bellatrix is also the name of a star in the constellation Orion – the
“warrior” connection giving her an almost cosmic menace.) Rowling’s learned naming
goes on:
Remus Lupin
, the mild-mannered professor who hides a werewolf’s curse,
carries a double homage to wolves. His first name Remus recalls one of the mythical twin
founders of Rome who was raised by a she-wolf, and his surname Lupin comes from
lupus
, Latin for “wolf”. In this way, even if a reader misses the reference initially, the
name retroactively gains significance once Lupin’s lycanthropy is revealed. Across the
series, such etymological clues abound –
Minerva
McGonagall is named after the Roman
goddess of wisdom (befitting a wise headmistress), and
Sirius
Black is named for the Dog
Star (apt for a character who can transform into a giant black dog). By borrowing from
Latin, French, and classical mythology in this manner, Rowling endows her wizarding
characters with names that
sound
authentic to a long-standing magical culture and often
wink at their true nature. The linguistic barbarism of mixing languages – Latin and
French into an English narrative – thus becomes an artful technique for characterization
and foreshadowing. Rowling’s borrowings are not limited to human names and spells;
she also
draws on folklore and archaic sources
to populate the magical world with
creatures and objects that carry a sense of legacy. Consider
Dobby
the house-elf: at first
glance,
Dobby
appears to be a purely whimsical name, but in fact it comes straight from
British folk tradition. In Katherine Briggs’ authoritative
Encyclopedia of Fairies
, a “dobby”
is defined as a kind of house spirit or hobgoblin in Yorkshire lore – a helpful creature akin
to a brownie, though prone to mischief. Rowling’s Dobby fits this description well: he is a
magical household servant who performs chores (like a brownie) yet can create chaos
with his efforts to “help,” and he ultimately becomes a benevolent trickster figure.
By using a genuine folkloric term, Rowling taps into pre-existing legends, lending Dobby’s
character an extra dimension for those familiar with fairy tales. This technique repeats
with several other magical creatures. The malevolent water demons called
Grindylows
in
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
take their name from an old Yorkshire legend of
a watery monster that drags children into ponds, and they behave in the book exactly as
their folklore counterpart. Similarly, the shape-shifting
boggart
that haunts closets and
Xorijiy lingvistika va lingvodidaktika – Зарубежная лингвистика
и лингводидактика – Foreign Linguistics and Linguodidactics
Special Issue –2 (2025) / ISSN 2181-3701
126
turns into one’s worst fear is named after an English bogeyman spirit, and the ominous
black spectral dog called the
Grim
echoes folklore of churchyard guardians (often
envisioned as dark dogs). These are not random inventions but deliberate resurrections
of “obscure or ‘hidden’” English words and myths – as one analyst put it, the English
language already contained these
“Potterisms before Potter”
, but they were tucked away
in dusty regional lore, much like the magical world is hidden from Muggles. Rowling’s
story dusts off these old terms and restores them to active use.
In the same spirit, the series revives a host of
archaic words
– some literary, some
colloquial – integrating them into the lexicon of the Wizarding World. A prime example is
Dumbledore
, the surname of Hogwarts’ revered Headmaster, Albus Dumbledore. Far from
being a fanciful jumble of syllables,
dumbledore
is actually an 18th-century dialect word
for “bumblebee”. Rowling chose it because she imagined the elderly wizard wandering
around humming to himself “like a bee”, a charming character detail embedded in a
single word. By the 1990s this term had fallen out of common knowledge, so to readers it
felt like an original name with a quirky sound – yet it subtly conveyed the character’s
benign, buzzing energy. Another term that Rowling plucked from obscurity is the now-
famous
Muggle
. In the novels,
muggle
refers to a person with no magic – essentially an
ordinary human. The word seems so fitting and natural in context that many assume it
was invented for the series. However,
muggle
has older attestations in English. The
author has noted that it echoes
mug
(slang for a gullible or foolish person), giving it a
mild pejorative flavor appropriate for how wizards might view uninformed outsiders.
More intriguingly, the Oxford English Dictionary records
muggle
as an early 20th-century
term meaning “sweetheart” (and in 1930s jazz slang, a
muggles
was a marijuana
cigarette, though that usage was very niche). These disparate older meanings were
unknown to most readers, so Rowling effectively repurposed
muggle
with a fresh
definition while retaining a vaguely old-timey sound. The result was a word that felt
authentic in her quasi-Victorian magical society and yet was easy for readers to learn and
use. Indeed,
muggle
proved so useful that it entered real language with an extended
meaning – people now talk about “muggles” in any specialized field to mean those
outside it. For example, tech workers might jokingly call non-tech people
muggles
, and
one early citation of this sense comes from 1999:
“She’s a muggle. No IT background or
aptitude at all,”
as quoted in
Computer Weekly
. The term became official when
Muggle
was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2003, defined as “a person who is not
conversant with a particular activity or skill” – a remarkable journey for a word that
began as a bit of wizarding slang.
Rowling’s talent for reviving
recondite
words extends further. Many readers
expanded their vocabulary through Harry Potter, often without realizing the words were
real to begin with. For instance, Book 2 introduces the deadly plant called a
Mandrake
,
used to brew a restorative potion – a concept drawn from medieval herb lore. In real
history, the mandrake (Latin
mandragora
) is a plant whose forked root was said to
resemble a human figure and which, according to legend, would emit a lethal scream
when uprooted. This archaic herb name and its lore were largely known only to scholars
or fantasy buffs, but after
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
, every young reader
knew what a mandrake was (and probably associated it with its scream). In fact, linguists
observed that
mandrake
and even the Latin variant
mandragora
saw a resurgence in
usage thanks to the books. Other archaic terms similarly got a new lease on life. The word
Xorijiy lingvistika va lingvodidaktika – Зарубежная лингвистика
и лингводидактика – Foreign Linguistics and Linguodidactics
Special Issue –2 (2025) / ISSN 2181-3701
127
squib
– in Potter’s world, a non-magical person born to wizard parents – was originally
an English word for a small firework. The idiom “a damp squib” (meaning a disappointing
failure) was still known in British English, though it had been declining in use in the late
20th century. Rowling’s redefinition of
Squib
(capitalized in the books) gave the word a
fresh significance. Suddenly,
Squib
was not just an antiquated metaphor but a character
type in a beloved story (e.g. Argus Filch, the cranky caretaker of Hogwarts, is revealed to
be a Squib). This new meaning gained such traction that it likely arrested the decline of
the original word: after 1997, corpus studies show
squib
’s frequency in English rising
again, buoyed by discussions of the Harry Potter kind of Squib.
The world of
Harry Potter
is a case study in how language borrowing and invention
can invigorate a narrative and even feed back into the language at large. Here is the
expanded table with
Uzbek translations or transcribed versions
for the analyzed
barbarisms in
Harry Potter
. If a direct translation is difficult, a
transcribed
version is
provided in parentheses.
CATEGORY
BARBARISM
ORIGIN & EXPLANATION
UZBEK TRANSLATION /
TRANSCRIPTION
Latin-Based Spells
& Phrases
Expelliarmus
(
expellere
= expel,
arma
=
weapons)
Qurolsizlantir
Lumos
(
lumen
= light)
Nur (Yorug'lik chiqarish
sehrli so‘zi)
Nox
(
nox
= night)
Tun (Qorong‘ulik
chaqirish sehrli so‘zi)
Expecto
Patronum
(
expecto
= I await,
patronum
=
guardian)
Himoyachimni kutaman
Finite
Incantatem
(
finite
= end,
incantatem
= spell)
Sehrni bekor qilish
Horcrux
(
horror
+
crux
, suggesting a dark
object with significance)
Sehrli jism (Horukruks –
transkriptsiya)
French Influences
Voldemort
(
vol de mort
= flight of death)
O‘limdan qochish
(Voldemor –
transkriptsiya)
Malfoy
(
mal foi
= bad faith)
Yomon niyatli
Beauxbatons
(
beaux
= beautiful,
bâtons
=
wands)
Chiroyli tayoqchalar
(sehrli tayoqlar)
Slavic/Russian
Influences
Karkaroff
Resembles Russian surname
structure
Karkarov – transkriptsiya
Dolohov
Phonetically Russian
Dolohov – transkriptsiya
Viktor Krum
Eastern European-styled name
Viktor Krum –
transkriptsiya
Obsolete English
Words
Dumbledore
18th-century term for
“bumblebee”
Asalari (Dambldor –
transkriptsiya)
Muggle
Old dialect word for a foolish
person, later a slang term
Sehrsiz odam (Mug‘l –
transkriptsiya)
Squib
Originally a small firework;
adapted to mean a non-magical
person
Sehrsiz tug‘ilgan (Skvib –
transkriptsiya)
Mandrake
Mythical plant in medieval
herbology
Sehrli o‘simlik
(Mandragora –
transkriptsiya)
Xorijiy lingvistika va lingvodidaktika – Зарубежная лингвистика
и лингводидактика – Foreign Linguistics and Linguodidactics
Special Issue –2 (2025) / ISSN 2181-3701
128
CONCLUSION
Language is, as novelist Rita Mae Brown observed,
“the road map of a culture.
It tells you where its people come from and where they are going.”
The language of
Harry
Potter
maps a journey that connects us back to ancient myths and languages, even as it
forges ahead with new expressions for new ideas. It has shown an entire generation that
playing with words – even
barbarous
words from forgotten eras or invented on the spot –
can be a source of magic in its own right.
REFERENCES:
1.
Ben Zimmer. (2011).
A Muggle’s View of Potter-Speak
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2.
Bond, C. (2021).
How J.K. Rowling Used Old Words to Create New Ones
. The
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etymology/
3.
Cambridge University Press. (2017).
J.K. Rowling’s Influence on the English
Language: New Words and Expressions from Harry Potter
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Oxford English Dictionary Adds "Muggle" as a Recognized
Word
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dictionary/
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Barbarism in Language: Definition and Examples
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are hundreds of distinctively Potter-esque words”
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в развитии восточной государственности и культуры, 1(1).
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Entertainment Weekly (J. Hibberd, 2015) – Notes that the Oxford English
Dictionary
added “muggle” in 2003
with the definition “a person who is not conversant
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Kamoljnovich, S. J. (2022). JK Roulingning Fantastik asarlaridagi
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