English and Efik Loanword Adaptation in Ejagham.pdf

This article aims at discovering the phonological changes that occur in Ejagham loanwords (consonants) sourced from English and Efik by investigating the adaptation strategies and parameters. It has been observed that when words are borrowed from another language into a language, they are often modified to suit the sound system of the recipient language. The theory adopted for this study is that of phonological/ phonetic view of loanwords adaptation by Paradis and Lacharite (1997) and Peperkamp and Dupoux (2003) which contends that foreign words are incorporated into a language on the basis of phonological similarity between L1 and L2 phonemic categories. Findings from this study revealed that English loanwords adaptation in Ejagham is triggered by a number of phonological processes such as deletion, voicing, devoicing and sound alternation. In some other instances, the changes may be motivated by indigenous innovations and not necessarily bysegmental approximation. Keywords: Borrowing, loanwords, adaptation, pereption, phonology, Efik, English,