Phonological adaptation of loanword into Egyptian Arabic

Abstract EN

Loanwords are words that entered one language from another language (the source language).

These types of words are also termed as borrowed words.

They are not part of the recipient language vocabulary, they are adopted from some other languages and become part of the borrowing language's vocabulary” Nordquist, R (2019)^[i].

Borrowing is a universal linguistic phenomenon; the majority of world languages contain borrowed words, because no nation has ever been completely isolated from other nations.

(Jepersen, 1964)^[ii].

Words are generally 'loaned' when two different cultures come into contact with each other (Hoffer, 2002)^[iii].

This might result from immigration, trade, fashions or foods, travelers' tales, the arts (paintings, books, poetry, or film), technologies, wars, or colonization.

Borrowing could occur across different linguistic levels; such as lexeme level, phonological level, morphological level, and/or syntactic level.

When a loanword transfers into a recipient language it is either adopted or adapted as noted by Bueasa, N (2015)^[iv].

Adoption occurs when the loanword is transferred into the recipient language without any change and is keeping its structure and pronunciation.

For example, in English, the word “café” is adopted from French.

On the opposite side, there is an adaptation in which the loanword undergoes linguistic changes to adapt to the phonological, or morphological, or syntactic structure of the recipient language.

For example, the French word “coiffeur” /kwɒfˈɜːr/ is adapted in Egyptian Arabic (henceforth, EA) phonologically as /kuwafe: r/, this type of integration happens intuitively for ease of pronunciation.

Like other languages, loanwords do exist in Arabic (Versteegh, 2014)[v].

Little studies such as Hafez (1996)^[vi] examine the integration of loanwords into Egyptian Arabic (EA).

Hence, the current study focuses on investigating the phonological integration of loanwords into EA by Egyptian native speakers.