CHAPTER ONE
- INTRODUCTION
The notion of loanwords remains inescapable in many studies about languages of the world. As a very crucial source of language change, borrowing or lending is a process of lexical change. It entails adding new items to a language or dialect by taking them from another language or dialect directly or indirectly. Speakers of different languages always come in contact for different reasons that range from religious to political. Where speakers of one language do not have a word available for a particular item, but the speakers of the other language do, the former borrow from the latter. In a normal learning situation, one finds an object for which there is no known name in the dominant language. Since that dominant language is absent, the name or label for the object is either borrowed from the local language or by some other means. This is common in a situation where those who ‘gave’ the language have gone away at the time of the need for a name for that particular new item. Everyone is thus faced with the need to account for these new items for which no name has been given in the target language.
In borrowing, there is an unconscious effort not to over-borrow or else there would be a breakdown in communication. This is because a group of persons who do not speak the language from which a large number of lexical items have been borrowed is not likely to understand the new dialect when spoken.
According to Michael (2011) Loanwords come into a language as a result of linguistics borrowing. A special type of borrowing is described as loan translation (Yule, 2006). It is otherwise known as morphological change (Andrew, 1992). Loanwords are features of bilingualism. Loanwords are lexical items taken from one language to another as a linguistic material (Spence, 1991).
When languages adopt loanwords, they typically modify the new items in keeping with the pre-existing structure of the recipient language (Campbell, 1998). In other words, loanwords are modified to fit the phonological as well as the morphological structures of the recipient language. For instance, the sound /0/ in the English word ‘thousand’ /0auznd/, is replaced with Anaang /t/ in /atausin/, /0/ is absent in Anaang, therefore since /t/ and /0/ share same phonetic similarity in place feature and voicelessness, /t/ is substituted for /0/. Where adoption is impossible, deletion or insertion rule is applied to modify such words.
Below are some examples of loanwords with their source and recipient language.
