Lexical interference in journalistic Arabic in Jordan

Abstract

This study is aimed at identifying foreign loanwords used in the Jordanian daily newspapers in the body and advertisement/announcement sections, and investigating the degree to which they varied in scope and frequency. The sample of the study comprised sixteen randomly selected issues of each of the three papers in the period from 25 August to 13 October 1988. The findings have shown that journalistic Arabic of Jordan is receptive to foreign neologisms and loanwords especially those of English origin. A typology of fifteen different domains was established and the percentage of loanwords was highest in the domain of ‘abstract concepts’ 14%, followed by ‘modern inventions and the automobile’ 11.5%, ‘brand names’ 13.8%, ‘oil products, chemicals and diseases’ 8.5%, ‘foods, clothes, and related services’ 7.7%, ‘sports, recreation and cosmetics’ 7.6%, ‘construction, housing and furniture’ 5.5%, 'measurement units' 5.1%, ‘music and musical instruments’ 4.1%, ‘professions and titles’ 3.8%, ‘academia’ 1.6%, and ‘finance and banking’ 1.6%. Linguistic analysis has shown that loanwords have undergone two major changes in meaning, namely restriction and generalization. It has also shown that the loanwords were subjected to Arabic inflectional morphology to fit the structure of Arabic. Finally, two conflicting views of the impact of this phenomenon on Arabic were presented and discussed.