FALSE FRIENDS IN GENERAL BILINGUAL DICTIONARIES (ENGLISH AND FRENCH INTO LATVIAN)

Over the last few decades, the influence of the English language onto the Latvian language has significantly increased. This is due to geopolitical events, rapidly growing media and technological advances where the global language is English. Consequently, the influx of English borrowings into Latvian has increased, raising the incidence of false friends. Notably, some long-established false friends either adopt another meaning or lose the original one aligning more closely with their English counterpart. French has also impacted Latvian, albeit through intermediary languages such as German and Russian. In this paper, examples of false friends in English-Latvian and French-Latvian bilingual dictionaries will be viewed and compared. Currently, there is one English-Latvian false friend dictionary published over three decades ago; the necessity for revisions that would account for recent linguistic developments need to be determined. Contrastive lexicographic analysis is applied.