English Loanword Adaptation in Telugu

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to provide a detailed phonological description of English loanwords in Telugu, a Dravidian language. The data is collected from a native speaker of Telugu. While confirming the loanword data previously reported, the current new empirical data obtained from fieldwork reveals several interesting aspects of loan adaptation. Two main findings of this study are as follows. First, English word-final consonants may or may not be geminated in Telugu to satisfy the stress requirement under the Stress-to-Weight Principle. Second, vowel epenthesis takes place in Telugu to repair dispreferred word-final consonants or consonant clusters in English loanwords, and the quality of the epenthetic vowel is determined by the position in a word, the type of the preceding consonant, or the type of the preceding vowel. It is also shown that the patterns of English loanword adaptation are generally constrained by phonological, phonetic, and orthographic properties of the source English words, as well as the native phonology of Telugu.