A Phonological Analysis of English Loanwords Inflected With Arabic Morphemes in Urban Jordanian Spoken Arabic

Aseel Zibin

SAGE Open, 2019, vol. 9, issue 2, 2158244019841927

Abstract: This article tackles a phenomenon in Urban Jordanian Arabic (UJA) where young individuals (mainly females) in Amman, the capital of Jordan, add the Arabic suffix - ɪk , which is glossed as second female singular or as a possessive pronoun, to English loanwords to sound more “modern,†for example, “I love you†becomes [lʌvvɪk]. Through examining the data, two initial hypotheses were formalized, namely, when the Arabic suffix - ɪk is added to English monosyllabic words which have a short vowel in the nucleus (e.g., love), the coda is geminated. However, if the word is disyllabic (e.g., mobile) or monosyllabic, but has a long vowel (e.g., juice) or a diphthong (e.g., face) in the nucleus, no gemination occurs. This article analyzes this phenomenon based on hierarchical syllable structure, metrical phonology, and optimality theory.

Keywords: linguistics; phonology; morphology; loanwords; optimality theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2158244019841927 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:sagope:v:9:y:2019:i:2:p:2158244019841927

DOI: 10.1177/2158244019841927

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in SAGE Open
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().