The Phonological Adaptation of English Loanwords in Jizani Arabic: An OT Analysis

Abstract

This paper presents a phonological analysis of English loanwords within Jizani Arabic (JA). JA is a Saudi dialect spoken in the southwestern region of Saudi Arabia, specifically in Jizan City, the capital of Jazan province. This study investigates the phonological adaptation of loanwords at both the segmental and suprasegmental levels using optimality theory (OT) constraints (Prince & Smolensky, 1993, 2004). A corpus consisting of 114 English loanwords that have been integrated into JA was analysed using the data elicitation technique. The study’s 15 participants are monolingual native speakers of JA. The results of the segmental adaptation show that JA speakers tend to use a process of nativisation to replace the sounds of both consonants and vowels in English loanwords that do not exist in JA with phonemes that are available in JA’s phonemic inventory. At the suprasegmental level, the stress of the loanwords falls on the heaviest syllable, following the stress pattern that governs words that are original to JA.