Phonological Adaptation of English Loanwords in Omani Arabic

Abstract

Lexical borrowing is a widespread linguistic phenomenon within world languages. Loanwords undergo adaptation processes to become fully integrated into the borrowing language. This study investigates the phonological adaptation processes of English loanwords in Omani Arabic at the segmental and suprasegmental levels. The study is based on the analysis of a corpus of 100 English loanwords that were collected using data elicitation techniques. The findings show that English loanwords undergo various phonological adaptation processes at the segmental and suprasegmental levels in the integration process. At the segmental level, it seems evident that the phonemes that are not part of the phonemic inventory of Omani Arabic are mapped into the closest counterparts or modified phonologically to fit the patterns of the native language. Adaptation processes such as phoneme substitution, deaffrication and monophthongization play a major role in the adaptation processes. Regarding the suprasegmental aspects in the nativisation process, two prominent adaptations can be observed: the insertion of the glottal stop /Ɂ/ in syllables lacking an onset and the insertion of epenthetic vowels in complex syllables. These modifications are made to adapt the English loanwords to the syllabification patterns of the native language. Furthermore, stress placement in English loanwords obeys stress patterns in Omani Arabic as stress is often placed on the heaviest syllable in the word.