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Part of
Arabic in Contact
Edited by Stefano Manfredi and Mauro Tosco
[Studies in Arabic Linguistics 6] 2018
► pp. 171–187

Phonetical and morphological remarks on the adaptation of Italian loanwords in Libyan Arabic

| The University of Mississippi

The contact between Italian and Libyan Arabic, whose earliest traces date back to the first half of the XIX century, intensified in the decades immediately preceding the Italian occupation of Libya (1911). The number of Italian loanwords in Libyan Arabic can be estimated at about 700 lexical items, although for some of them the source might be another Romance language. The present study integrates the loanwords provided by Abdu (1988) with more lexical items collected from Yoda (2005), Pereira (2010) and the author’s personal fieldwork. The data obtained are subsequently analyzed from a phonetical and morphological perspective, contributing to the knowledge of the processes of adaptation of Italian loanwords in Libyan Arabic.

Keywords: Libyan Arabic, Italian, loanwords, borrowings, Arabic dialectology, Arabic linguistics
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.Phonetics
    • 1.1Consonants
      • 1.1.1Italian phonemes absent from the phonemic inventory of Libyan Arabic
        • 1.1.1.1The voiceless bilabial occlusive /p/
        • 1.1.1.2The voiced labiodental fricative /v/
        • 1.1.1.3Affricates
        • 1.1.1.4The palatal lateral approximant /ʎ/ and the palatal nasal /ɲ/
      • 1.1.2Italian phonemes with possibly different Libyan outputs
    • 1.2Vowels
      • 1.2.1Stressed vowels
      • 1.2.2Unstressed vowels
    • 1.3Assimilation and dissimilation
  • 2.Morphology
    • 2.1Nouns
      • 2.1.1Deglutination of the article
        • 2.1.1.1Gender
        • 2.1.1.2Influence of Arabic nominal patterns
    • 2.2Integration of verbs
  • Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 10 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sal.6.09dan
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