LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 20:12 December 2020
ISSN 1930-2940

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         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
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         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Managing Editor & Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.

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Loanwords in the Taxonomy of Borrowing: A Sociolinguistic Analysis

Loae Fakhri Jdetawy and Mohd Hilmi Hamzah

Abstract

The current research paper discusses the phenomenon of loanwords in light of a range of other borrowing phenomena that are more or less closely related to loanwords. The study concluded that loanwords make up the most frequent type of lexical borrowing and an inevitable consequence, among other various outcomes, of the contact between languages. The study further concluded that borrowing loanwords allows the recipient language to expand its vocabulary, however the loanwords borrowed from any donor language have to undergo certain processes to make them fit appropriately into the recipient language. These processes include: 1) a process of adaptation, in which non-native phonemes are substituted to fit the recipient language’s sound structure, and 2) a process of accommodation, in which phonological patterns are modified according to the phonological rules of the recipient language. The results provided from this present study also showed that there are different levels to which a borrowed loanword from the donor language become assimilated into the recipient language. In addition, the level of such assimilation depends on two factors; time and usage, in a way that the longer since the loanword was borrowed from the donor language and the more it is used by the speakers of the recipient language, the greater its degree of assimilation and familiarity. Finally, many reasons and motives lying behind the existence of loanwords were highlighted in the current research paper.

Keywords: Language contact, loanwords, borrowing, cognates, calque, phono-semantic matching, donor language, recipient language.

Introduction

The linguistic diversity, or the diversity of the languages spoken worldwide by the world’s population makes language a remarkable cultural phenomenon (Hennig, 2018). As for the map of the diversity of languages around the world, according to Lewis, et al. (2015) and Eberhard, et al, (2020), it is believed that around 7,099 living languages are spoken around the world among which 3,982 of these languages have a developed writing system.

In fact, the diversity of the languages includes the existence of various languages and their distribution in various regions, countries, or even among civilizations, as well as their evolution in historical context, and their mutual interaction. Further, the linguistic diversity can also include the influence of languages on each other. Additionally, linguistic diversity represents the specific measurement of a particular language’s density, the concentration of unique languages together, the diversity of the language’s populations, or oven the linguistic diversity of a specific place in a way that such measurement covers a various type of traits including languages’ families, languages’ grammar, and their vocabulary.

In light of the previously mentioned linguistic diversity, all languages tend to show some degree of contact, interference, mixing, and borrowing due to the virtue of containing loanwords (Matras, 2000). Actually, the study of the contact and interference of the languages plays a significant role in presenting valuable information on the journey of languages, the journey of the people who speak these languages, and other communities who came into contact with these languages or their speakers and how this might give us a clarification on the outcomes of the contact and interference of the languages that can be seen through the use of exact same words and concepts by different nations and communities that are geographically remote (UL, 2020).

Moreover, languages expand their vocabulary using the usual word-formation processes such as: derivation, compounding, blending, and clipping. Moreover, languages can also achieve this goal through borrowing new words from other languages with which they come in contact which is indeed an almost inevitable consequence of this contact. Borrowing is defined as a process that occurs in various situations of language contact and by which a language or a variety of language takes new linguistic material, such as words or phrases, from another language or another language variety, usually called the donor. The term ‘loanword’, which makes up the most frequent type of lexical borrowing, refers to the borrowing of both, the form of a word and the associated word meaning (Grabmann, 2015). Haspelmath said that “loanwords often undergo changes to make them fit better into the recipient language. These changes are generally called ‘loanword adaptation’ (or loanword integration) […]” (2009: 42).

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Loae Fakhri Jdetawy and Mohd Hilmi Hamzah
School of Languages, Civilisation & Philosophy
Universiti Utara Malaysia
jdtwy@yahoo.com
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