The phonology and morphology of English loanwords in Jordanian Arabic

Abstract EN

This paper investigates the effect of Jordanian Arabic phonology and morphology on loanwords borrowed from English .

It begin with deferential description of the phonemic inventories of English and Arabic and points out significant difference and areas of divergence between the two languages with special reference to germination and emphasis , which the paper argues are distance feature of Arabic consonants’ .

Using a large corpus of recorded Jordanian Arabic speech the paper shows that colloquial Jordanian Arabic has a higher number of loanword than the written standard variety .

It also shows the phonological changes loanword during the process of borrowing are in accordance with Arabic rules of emphasis , germination , assimilation , stress , vowel length , epenthesis and syncope .

However , Jordanian Arabic is shown to have acquired the phoneme /v/ as a direct result of English loanword .