Euro- en zijn concurrenten

This article deals with the Dutch bound morpheme euro-, meaning ‘European’ or ‘Europe’ in relatively young word formations. The morpheme in question is not to be confounded with the word euro for the European currency. The article especially deals with the relationship between word formation with euro- and three other means of expressing more or less the same meaning: word formation with EG- (abbreviation of Europese Gemeenschap, i.e. European Union) as a first component, word formation with Europa- (Europe) as a first component and word groups with the adjective Europees (European). This relationship is explored in two comparative studies. First the token frequency in a corpus is investigated. It turns out that euro- is more frequent than Europa-, but less frequent than EG- and Europees. In a second comparison the semantic-functional domains of the four alternatives are considered in detail. Euro- apparently can be used as an alternative for Europees and EG- when the referents are related to the European Union, and as an alternative for Europees in ‘bilateral’ adjectives such als Euro-Russisch. It also has a few domains of its own: commercial proper names and words expressing an attitude towards the European Union. An additional analysis of individual words and word groups with different alternatives from this paradigm as a first component but the same second component reveals that even in individual cases of competition with other alternatives, the variant with euro- is sometimes the most frequent or the institutionalized form. It is concluded that within the linguistic potential of naming referents that relate to Europe, euro- has its own specific value as a productive means of word formation.