Phonological and morphological adaptation of loanwords in Dagbani

Abstract

The study investigates phonological and morphological adaptation of loanwords in Dagbani, a Mabia (Gur) language spoken in the Northern part of Ghana. In contrast to existing literature in the language, this study examines a typology of loanwords adaptation in Dagbani. Data of 260 loanwords were drawn from existing literature, Dagbani dictionary, elicitation and my native intuition, and analysis was cast within the theoretical framework of Basic Linguistic Theory of Dixon (1997). The findings demonstrate that phonological processes which underline loanwords adaption are triggered by syllable structure differences in the adaptor and donor languages. Loanwords that are adapted from languages such as English, Arabic, Hausa and Akan into Dagbani undergo some repair strategies to ensure that those loanwords are adjusted into the syllable structure rules of Dagbani. Some phonological adaptation processes analyzed here include segmental adaptation, segmental processes (e.g palatalization, debuccalization, liquid substitution and fortition) and syllable structure processes including epenthesis, deletion, diphthongs adaptation and importation. The study also analyzed morphological adaptation processes such as inflectional suffixes, derivational suffixes, aspectual markers and compounding. I conclude that Arabic models mostly undergo segmental adaptation in Dagbani whilst loanwords from the four source languages undergo various forms of segmental processes and syllable structure processes. Finally, I contend that the need to fill lexical and semantic gaps, religious and cultural dominance as well as trade license borrowing in Dagbani. The study is important because it approaches the study of loanwords adaptation from a perspective that has not been done in the literature available so far.