Semantic Change
In bilingual situations, false friends often result in a semantic change—a real new meaning that is then commonly used in a language. For example, the Portuguese humoroso ("capricious") changed its referent in American Portuguese to "humorous", owing to the English surface-cognate "humorous."
"Corn" was originally the dominant type of grain in a region (indeed "corn" and "grain" are themselves cognates from the same Indo-European root). It came to mean usually cereals in general in the British Isles in the nineteen century e.g. Corn laws, but maize in North America, and now just maize also in the British Isles.
The Italian word "confetti" (sugared almonds) has acquired a new meaning in English and French - in Italian, the corresponding word is "coriandoli".
The American Italian fattoria lost its original meaning "farm" in favour of "factory" owing to the phonetically similar surface-cognate English "factory" (cf. Standard Italian fabbrica "factory"). Instead of the original fattoria, the phonetic adaptation American Italian farma (Weinreich 1963: 49) became the new signifier for "farm"—see "one-to-one correlation between signifiers and referents".
This phenomenon is analysed by Ghil'ad Zuckermann as "(incestuous) phono-semantic matching".
Read more about this topic: False Friend
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