Language Contact
2 articles filed under this keyword.
A Morpho-phonological Adaptation of English Loanwords into Central Kurdish in Selected Political Texts
Saeed Rasul Hama, Khalid Ali Abdallah
The present study examines the morpho-phonological adaptation of English loanwords into Central Kurdish within the context of political news articles. The study focuses on how English lexical items are integrated phonologically and morphologically into the Central Kurdish Dialect (or CK), demonstrating the constant language contact and influence. For this purpose, a total of 9 political news articles are analyzed, drawn from three major Kurdish news outlets, namely, Rudaw, Channel 8, and Kurdistan 24 (K24), that were published during the first quarter of 2025 (January, February, and March). The selection of articles was based on their titles and likelihood of containing loanwords from English. The articles covered news events of local, regional, and international political news, depending on the categorization as appears on the websites. The analysis focuses on segmental and supra-segmental phonological adaptation processes such as substitution, stress modification, syllable restructuring, as well as morphological integration through Kurdish inflectional and derivational patterns. The findings demonstrate and highlight systematic adaptation strategies of English loanwords into Central Kurdish, shaped by both linguistic structures and the sociopolitical role of media, particularly political news websites, as they get the most readers' attention nowadays.
Volume 11 · Issue 6 · December 2024Grammatical Loan Translation in the Newswriting Language of Kurdish Websites
Sherwan Husen Hamad, Dadyar Azad Mahroof
This paper investigated a critical feature of language contact phenomenon which is “grammatical loan translation”. In grammatical loan translation, the receptor language transfers a linguistic component whether it is morphology or syntax from the source language as simultaneously as the word order typology and grammatical features of that language. In other words, grammatical loan translation is interfererance of the grammatical rules and features of the source language to the receptor language, thus resulting in an unnatural change in the grammar of that language. Scholars in the field of language contact consider that grammatical loan translation is the resultant of the bilingual phenomenon. Additinaly, they believe that grammatical pattern translation rarely occurs without the existence of bilingual phenomenon in society. However, it is obvious that there is no bilingual phenomenon in Kurdistan Region as the Kurdish is the main language of education, media and governance, but many foreign (non-Kurdish) grammatical patterns came into the Kurdish language, especially into the language of news writing. This phenomenon reflected in all the categories of the language, and sentences. Grammatical loan translation has critical effect on language as it has been called language poison by researchers as well as language passive and language death by some others. Therefore, if language planning is not taken into consideration for this linguistic phenomenon, it can change the grammatical feature and gender of a language since the basic system of a language is preserved via grammar.