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Arabic in Contact
Edited by Stefano Manfredi and Mauro Tosco
[Studies in Arabic Linguistics 6] 2018
► pp. 189–205

An assessment of the Arabic lexical contribution to contemporary spoken Koalib

| LLACAN-UMR8135 (CNRS/INALCO/Université Sorbonne Paris Cité)

The present paper deals with the lexical contribution of Arabic, the dominant language of Sudan, to Koalib, a Kordofanian language traditionally spoken in the northeastern part of the Nuba Mountains (Southern Kordofan, central Sudan). The study is based on a corpus of 400 Koalib items borrowed from Arabic, the main characteristics of which (social context, phonology, part of speech and semantics) are successively examined and discussed. The conclusion summarizes the main typological implications of the Arabic influence upon the Koalib grammatical system.

Keywords: borrowings, Koalib, Kordofanian, language contact, lexicon, Nuba Mountains, Sudanese Arabic
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.Koalib and Arabic in contact: Some basic notions
    • 1.1Linguistic characteristics of the contact
      • 1.1.1Varieties of Arabic involved in the contact
      • 1.1.2Varieties of Koalib involved in the contact
    • 1.2 Social characteristics of the contact between Koalib and Arabic
    • 1.3 The Arabic loanwords discussed in this study
  • 2.Phonological integration of Arabic borrowings into Koalib
    • 2.1Segmental integration
    • 2.2Tonal integration
  • 3.Arabic borrowings according to their parts of speech and their morphological characteristics
    • 3.1 Common nouns
      • 3.1.1Formal integration
      • 3.1.2Paradigmatic integration
      • 3.1.3Introducing new distinctions into Koalib: The case of sex-based gender
    • 3.2Proper nouns
    • 3.3Verbs
    • 3.4Adverbs
      • 3.4.1Classical loanwords
      • 3.4.2Arabic-Koalib adverbial bases used in conjugation
    • 3.5 Other parts of speech
  • 4.Some semantic characteristics of Arabic borrowings
    • 4.1Typical semantic fields
    • 4.2Conventionalized calques
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Abbreviations
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
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 [email protected].

Published online: 10 July 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sal.6.10qui
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