Cultural adaptation of loanwords in mosuli Arabic dialect : a socio-linguistic study

الملخص EN

This paper investigates the cultural adaptation of loanwords in Mosuli Arabic from a sociolinguistic perspective.

It aims at investigating the extent of the sociolinguistic factors, namely : age, gender, social class and educational attainment, influence on loanwords usage in Mosuli speech community and the effect of the surrounding regions on Mosuli Arabic.

It is hypothesised that the sociolinguistic factors have influence on the rate of loanwords usage in that community and that the environmental factor has influential effect in introducing loanwords into it.

To achieve all these, a sociolinguistic modified model, namely : Poplack et al (1988) is adopted.

Informal interviews are conducted with forty-eight native Mosuli speakers divided equally according to sociolinguistic factors (namely : age, gender, social class and educational level) to calculate the rate of loanwords used by each subgroup and, then, analysed in the light of the adopted model.

This study finds that the sociolinguistic factors affect loanwords usage in Mosuli Arabic.

Although Mosuli speech community has a shared strategy for incorporating loanwords into Mosuli Arabic discourse and that there is a uniform pool of loanwords in Mosuli speech community and each speaker chooses from this pool, there is a slight tendency for one subgroup to use loanwords rather than its counterpart.

It is observed that female, old age, low class and illiterate groups incline to use loanwords rather than their counterparts.