Morphophonological Features of Lɛtɛ Loanwords from English

Abstract

The aim of this paper is two-fold: to describe the phonological and morphological features of English loanwords (nouns and verbs) which appear in Lɛtɛ lexicon and to identify and account for the largest semantic class of English loanwords. Lɛtɛ (Kwa: Guan) is spoken in Larteh, a town in southeast Ghana. The language has not received much attention, and as such, there has been no study to investigate the phenomenon of lexical borrowing in the language. The linguistic situation in Larteh is characterized by trigglosia, a situation where three languages with distinct communicative functions are in use. Akuapem Twi is the second language of most Lɛtɛ speakers. The paper distinguishes between codeswitching from borrowing to initiate the discussion from the right perspective. Motivation for borrowing from English primarily stems from the need to fill lexical gaps in Lɛtɛ. Consequently, data for the study suggest that the semantic class of science and technology is the largest of all the semantic domains of English loanwords. Data sources include bilingual wordlists of English and Lɛtɛ; focus group discussions and Lɛtɛ folktales. Upon analyzing the data, we observed that English loanwords undergo morphological and phonological alterations such as epenthesis and vowel harmonization to become nativized. The study is underpinned by the Matrix Language Frame Model (MLFM) (Myers-Scotton, 1997; Myers-Scotton et al., 2002), a model which is designed to account for bilingual speech. Following the MLFM, lexical items which enter Lɛtɛ lexicon are expected to take up morphological and phonological features of the language. Our study however found out that not all loanwords exhibit morphophonological features of Lɛtɛ; in the case of loan nouns, the Akuapem Twi number markers are rather employed. The paper adds to existing literature on borrowing and points out that a matrix language does not always dictate new linguistics features that are borne by the loanwords, but the linguistic situation of the recipient language community, coupled with the language repertoire of speakers play a roleю