A Morphophonological Analysis Of Nouns Borrowed By Kiswahili And Hausa From Arabic

ABSTRACT

This study is a morphophonological analysis of some nouns borrowed by Hausa and Kiswahili from Arabic. Despite the fact that Hausa and Kiswahili belong to different linguistic families and are spoken in such distant areas of Africa they share a special historical background. The three main objectives of this research are: to identify the Kiswahili and Hausa nouns borrowed from Arabic; to determine the word formation processes applied in the Hausa and Kiswahili nouns borrowed from Arabic; to determine the morphophonological differences between the adaptation of nouns borrowed by Kiswahili and Hausa from Arabic. The research respondents are selected Kenyatta University students from both West and East Africa. The source of data for this research used was written literature. Informants who are native speakers of Hausa and Kiswahili speakers had also been used to supplement or justify the data generated; the study narrowed itself on nouns only, a hundred (100) loanwords were collected and analyzed within the framework of the Optimality Theory (OT) which accounts for loanword adaptations using internal phonological grammar of the borrowing language only. The presentation of the data analysis of this research was based on loanword adaptation in the two languages that depends on three repairs that is vowel epenthesis, consonant deletion, and feature change respectively. The analyses revealed that in dealing with disallowed codas and consonant clusters, three main strategies: insertion, deletion and feature change were applied in order to satisfy highly-ranked markedness constraint in Hausa and Kiswahili. In a few examples, however, faithfulness prevails over markedness, leading to change in the phonology of Hausa and Kiswahili. The findings of research have implications on the expansion and growth of the two languages as the research discusses phonological and morphological modification of which loanword makes languages develop their vocabulary. Finally, the research endeavored to show that morphophonology is involved in the adaptation of Hausa and Kiswahili from Arabic.