Loanword adaptation in Kusaal a phonological study

Abstract

This study investigates loanwords from Ghanaian English, Akan and Hausa into Kusaal, a Mabia (Gur) language spoken in northeastern Ghana. The purpose of the study is to investigate how source segments are adapted into Kusaal phonology. It also seeks to investigate the syllable structure processes ongoing in Kusaal loanword adaptation within Optimality Theoretical framework. The study adopts a qualitative research approach where data was elicited from both primary and secondary sources. For the primary source, data was collected through interviews with 25 consultants, together with native speaker intuition, while data from the secondary source was collected from documents. The findings on segmental adaptation show that source segments which do not exist in Kusaal are adapted by means of a replacement with the closest native segment, such as consonant adaptation where the voiced and voiceless affricates are adapted as voiced and voiceless velar stops [g] and [k] respectively. Moreover, the study reveals that voicing assimilation, obstruent devoicing, debuccalisation and fortitioning among others contribute to consonantal changes in Kusaal loanword adaptation. With regard to vocalic adaptation, diphthongs and sequences of vowels are monophthongised by a deletion of the high vowels or coalesced into non-high vowels. On the syllable structure processes, the study finds that the epenthetic segments /u/, /ʊ/, /i/ and /ɪ/ are used to simplify consonant clusters or sequences of consonants at syllable boundaries, while consonant deletion also resolves source words with illicit syllable structures. The study concludes that phonological adaptation strategies ensure that loanwords conform to the phonology of Kusaal.