ASPECT OF BORROWING IN THE IPE AND YORUBA LANGUAGES

Abstract

Borrowed words are those that found their ways into a particular language from another which were not part of the vocabulary initially. This is as a result of educational, religious, political or incidental social contacts. These borrowed or loan words are used as part of the lexicon of the new language, because they have gone through some phonological and morphological processes in the language. This paper explicates the aspect of borrowing as a morphological process in the Ipe and Yoruba Languages in order to account for how words from other languages found their ways into the lexicons of Ipe and Yoruba. The study is corpus based and also a word-based morphological study. It depends primarily on the words available in the lexicon of the two indigenous languages under investigation. Data is elicited from both monolingual and bilingual native-speakers of the Ipe Language and the Yoruba Language in Ipe-Akoko and Oyo towns respectively. With the deployment of the Hocket (1954)’s Item and Arrangement and Word and Paradigm as expatiated by Crystal (2008), the study reveals that while the Ipe language has borrowed extensively from English, Yoruba and Edo, the Yoruba language has borrowed so much from English and Hausa, due to colonization, education, politics and social-economic contacts. It concludes that there is the need to investigate more into the Nigerian indigenous languages in order to prevent them from endangerment and possible extinction. The study recommends that studies in other morphological processes such as reduplication, blending, clipping, affixation and compounding in Nigeria’s indigenous languages should be carried out to further give prominence to the languages.