Abstract:
This study investigates loanwords from Ghanaian English, Akan and Hausa into
Kusaal, a Mabia (Gur) language spoken in northeastern Ghana. The purpose of the
study is to investigate how source segments are adapted into Kusaal phonology. It
also seeks to investigate the syllable structure processes ongoing in Kusaal loanword
adaptation within Optimality Theoretical framework. The study adopts a qualitative
research approach where data was elicited from both primary and secondary sources.
For the primary source, data was collected through interviews with 25 consultants,
together with native speaker intuition, while data from the secondary source was
collected from documents. The findings on segmental adaptation show that source
segments which do not exist in Kusaal are adapted by means of a replacement with
the closest native segment, such as consonant adaptation where the voiced and
voiceless affricates are adapted as voiced and voiceless velar stops [g] and [k]
respectively. Moreover, the study reveals that voicing assimilation, obstruent
devoicing, debuccalisation and fortitioning among others contribute to consonantal
changes in Kusaal loanword adaptation. With regard to vocalic adaptation,
diphthongs and sequences of vowels are monophthongised by a deletion of the high
vowels or coalesced into non-high vowels. On the syllable structure processes, the
study finds that the epenthetic segments /u/, /ʊ/, /i/ and /ɪ/ are used to simplify
consonant clusters or sequences of consonants at syllable boundaries, while consonant
deletion also resolves source words with illicit syllable structures. The study
concludes that phonological adaptation strategies ensure that loanwords conform to
the phonology of Kusaal.
Description:
A thesis in the Department of Gur-Gonja Education,
College of Ghanaian Languages Education, submitted to the
School of Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfilment
of the Requirement for the Award of Master of Philosophy
(Ghanaian Language Studies)
in the University of Education, Winneba