2719: Why You “Do Laundry” and Don’t “Make” It May 31, 2024

Inherently, there is no reason why English’s phrase is “to do laundry” when German’s is „Wäsche machen“ literally “making laundry”. In general, languages don’t have a distinct word like “do”, or at least they’re not used as productively, and will double up on “make” to mean both “create” and ‘perform’, as happens when French uses «faire son marché» for “to [do] shopping”, leading to some long-established Louisianans, in that former French colony, to say “[I’ll] make shopping”. 

This is nothing rare, and around the world not only will one language adopt a word from another, but grammar and lexicon etc. influence one another as well. This happens from both second language speakers incorrectly transferring the grammar from their native language, but even native speakers adopt foreign grammar and lexical use in border regions all the time.