Department: Linguistics African and European Languages
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Borrowing and Clipping as Means of Language Enrichment: A Study of Arabic Personal Names in Baatonum
Borrowing and Clipping are two important and most common sources of new words in many languages. History has shown that languages have adopted and adapted lexical items and other linguistic elements from other languages; this being the consequence of cultural contact between speakers of the donor and receiving languages. Baatonum, as one of the minority languages in West Africa, through contact with different languages (English, French, Dendi, Hausa, and Yoruba) and with Islam has adopted a vast number of words from these languages and more significantly from Arabic. The advent of Islam among the ethnic entity in the name of Baatombu in the 16th century, and subsequent embracing of the faith by the people had opened the gate for Arabic terms including those concerning commerce, education, religion etc. to penetrate into Baatonum. The concern of this present study therefore is to examine the adoption and clipping of Arabic personal names in Baatonum and how these have contributed to the enrichment of the receiving language. The study adopts the Qualitative Descriptive Analysis in analyzing the data. The paper observes that, the adaptability of the source language on one hand, and the receptivity of the recipient on the other have both contributed to the large scale vocabularies of Arabic origin in Baatonum. The paper finally recommends that subsequent researchers do more studies in this aspect to reveal more personal names of Arabic origin in Baatonum.
Key words: Borrowing; Clipping; Personal names; Adoption; Cultural contact
