Arabic Loanwords In Swahili: Addenda

• Authors: Sergio Baldi
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This article deals mainly with a phonological treatment of Arabic loans, offering examples of how each Arabic phoneme is rendered in Swahili. The work is based on a large database collected from main Swahili dictionaries and previous literature on this topics. It is interesting to show that the phonological system has absorbed some Arabic sounds along with the borrowed vocabulary, although the grammatical structure of the language has been unaffected by its contact with Arabic. The method of choosing true loans was based on the phonological and the semantic resemblance among the two languages. The result of a such work was a first large panorama of a phonological Arabic loans treatment. Arabic has introduced into Swahili some phonemes which did not exist. There is some variation among Swahili speakers in the pronunciation of these loanwords. The borrowed phonemes are most likely to occur in the speech of Muslim native speakers from the coast and for whom pronunciation of these sounds as closely as possible to the Arabic model is a matter of prestige. Swahili was also a medium of spreading Arabic Loans, so for this reason at the end of the article, some examples of Arabic loans, which were spread through Swahili in Eastern Africa, are given.

Keywords

EN

Arabic; Swahili; loanwords

• Publisher: Poznańskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk
• Journal: Lingua Posnaniensis
• Year: 2008
• Volume: 50
• Pages: 9-22

Contributors

author

Sergio Baldi

• Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale” 80134 Napoli, Italy