Variations of Arabic Loanwords in the Perlis Malay Dialect: Geolinguistic Analysis

Abstract

Perlis is a unique state because it borders a foreign country in the north which is Thailand and next to the state of Kedah. This unique position also has an impact on the Malay dialect spoken by native speakers in Perlis. While this loan word in Arabic is seen in the Malay language as having a close connection with Islam which is held by the majority of the Malay community. The Malay race is seen as synonymous with Islam, including in the aspect of language. While Islam is synonymous with Arabic, which is the language of choice for conveying the content of the Quran. This study will analyze some Arabic loanwords used in the Perlis Malay dialect. Therefore this study will try to study the distribution of dialects in Perlis. This study is one of the initial efforts to study the Malay dialect of Perlis from a dialectological point of view that focuses on loanwords in Arabic used by native speakers of Perlis. In general, the focus of the study area covers several selected villages in the state of Perlis. Some lexical Arabic loanwords that are seen to have a lot of variation will be the lexical choice in this study. Therefore, by using the generative transformation formula to see the changes that occur in lexical variants involving the lexical phonology of "kafir", "takdir" and "sahur". This study is also a continuation of previous studies that studied dialects and also focused on the pronunciation of Arabic loanwords used by residents in the state of Perlis.
 Keywords: Perlis dialect, Arabic borrowing, generative transformation formula.