Language Contact and Linguistic Borrowing in Igbo Legislative Domain
Keywords:
Quadrilingual, Borrowing, Translation Technique, Linguistic, Language ContactAbstract
This paper examines language contact and linguistic borrowing in legislative domain. Any given language has a limited stock of morphemes available and at the same time, it is an acknowledged fact that the number of concepts requiring expression continues to increase everyday with the explosive growth of human knowledge. This is the basis and motivation of this research. It seeks to identify legislative borrowed terms and its sound and examine the equivalent in English as a result of language contact. The data for the study is selected from the Quadrilingual Glossary of Legislative Terms using a purposive sampling method. Findings have shown the taking over of words from another language. Igbo language, of course, borrowed terms from English language. That is to say all
borrowed words have their sounding similar to the meaning they signify and often the meaning of such words can be easily guessed. Every language has its sets of sounds and the usefulness of those sounds, but the sounds are borrowed words. Furthermore, phonetic modification occurs in borrowing of foreign words. In conclusion, there is room for Igbo to coin words to suit certain term and translation equivalent to boost their richness in vocabulary. Borrowing is a translation technique; it shows legislative terms in Igbo all having their sound absolutely motivated from English.
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