Language ideology and lexical borrowing: attitudes toward Arabic loanwords among Swahili-speaking academics
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Introduction Over the past twenty years, speakers' linguistic attitudes have gained considerable attention among scholars working in language contact and sociolinguistics. Language loyalty and linguistic ideology are decisive factors that can either encourage or hinder lexical borrowing among languages. A substantial body of work has suggested that examining speakers' attitudes offers a way to anticipate the outcomes of language contact. Despite this, attitudes have received relatively little focus within research on bilingualism and language contact specifically. Methods To shed light on how speakers' attitudes operate within bilingual communities, the present empirical study, drawing on language ideology theory and the matched-guise approach, examined the covert and overt attitudes that Swahili speakers hold toward Arabic loanwords in Swahili. The data were collected from nine Swahili-speaking academics of different ages and national backgrounds via an online questionnaire. Two main methodological tools were implemented to elicit speakers' covert and overt attitudes, namely, a text-based adapted matched guise experiment and a direct metapragmatic questioning approach. Results The preliminary findings indicate that these speakers held broadly neutral attitudes, with no evidence of negative evaluation. Discussion Such accommodating attitudes are consistent with, though they cannot on their own account for, the extensive lexical borrowing from Arabic, contributing to the conventionalization of many of these borrowings within the Swahili community. Given the small sample size ( N = 9), however, these results should be interpreted as exploratory and warrant further investigation with larger and more diverse samples.
Source: Frontiers in Communication
Author: Khalid Azzubaidi
Language: English
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,418
OpenAlex ID: W7214335662