Loanword Adaptation in Najdi Arabic

Abstract

The interest in studying loanword adaptation has been accompanied by a long- standing debate on how to approach such phenomena. Various phonological and phonetic approaches have been proposed to account for such phenomena (Paradis & LaCharité 1997; Uffmann 2001; Steriade 2001; Peperkamp & Dupoux 2003; Silverman 1992, and Yip 1993), among others. Therefore, the goal of this study is to contribute generally to the field of loanword phonology and to the phonology of the Najdi Arabic dialect in particular. The study investigates the adaptations of English consonantal and syllabic structures into Najdi Arabic. Moreover, it examines whether the adaptations employed by Najdi speakers are phonologically or phonetically grounded. Therefore, 1,234 tokens were elicited from 12 Najdi participants divided in two groups: 6 monolingual and 6 bilingual Najdi speakers. Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004) is implemented as an analytical tool in this study.

The primary results of this dissertation show that no deletion is applied in Najdi Arabic consonantal adaptation since four English consonants are adapted by substituting them with native Najdi consonants and two English consonants are imported. With respect to syllabic adaptation, the results reveal that NA speakers adapted illicit clusters by epenthesis, i.e., inserting a vowel to break up clusters and without any instance of deletion. Both consonantal and syllabic adaptations in NA show that they are phonologically guided. In conclusion, this study favors the phonological approach (Paradis & LaCharité 1997) over the phonetic approach (Peperkamp & Dupoux 2003).