A Morpho-Phonological Analysis of Borrowings in Ciluba Utterances by Kinshasa Motor Riders

Abstract

Abstract : Borrowings are inevitable in a multilingual context. This paper investigates the use of borrowings by motor riders commonly called wewa in Kinshasa, Kalamu (Ezo). The objective of the study is to explore how these speakers go about borrowing and identify which of the different changes appears frequently as far as phonology and morphology are concerned. We have worked on a corpus of 20 sentences containing each of them a single load-word (borrowing). After analysis of all these words, results show that a total of 19 changes occurred in our informants’ borrowing processes. The distribution of the different changes displays 1 instance of double infinitive, 4 instances of epenthesis, 10 instances of final vowel addition, 1 instance of vowel shortening, 1 instance of consonant deletion, 2 instances of palatalization, 3 instances of de-palatalization, 3 instances of vowel nasalization, 1 instance of labialization, 2 instances of consonant devoicing, 5 instances of vowel backing, 1 instance of vowel fronting, 2 instances of vowel rising, 1 instance of prothesis, 3 instances of de-palatalization, 1 instance of vowel de-nasalization, 1 instance of vowel simplification, 1 instance of vowel lowering and 1 instance of consonant deletion. This research is both a documentary and ethnographical research since we resorted at the same time to written materials and informants to collect data. As for data analysis, auditory analysis, corpus analysis and the statistic method were instrumental. Keywords: Borrowing, code-mixing, code-switching, sociolinguistics, loans