The evolution of Arabic loanwords in the languages of East and West Africa

The article deals with the evolution of words borrowed from the Arabic language in two major African languages - Swahili and Hausa, from the mid-20th century to the present day. We used S. Baldi’s dictionary A First Ethnolinguistic Comparison of Arabic Loanwords Common to Hausa and Swahili as a basis for comparative analysis. The analysis allowed us to identify the peculiarities of the functioning of Arabic loanwords in the Swahili and Hausa languages at the contemporary stage of their development. These are code-switching at the phonological level, lexical and semantic variations of linguistic borrowings introduction (semantic broadening or narrowing, acquisition of a new meaning different from the original one), grammar transformation (change of the part of speech, derivational activity). When adapting Arabic loanwords, the Swahili and Hausa languages adhere to certain strategies, which are generally common to both languages. The paper is mainly focused on the study of the lexical and semantic relations between the prototype and the correlative borrowing in the modern Swahili and Hausa languages, the identification of changes in the original semantic structure of a word in the recipient language or its conservation with the motivational feature being preserved. There are distinguished thematic groups of Arabic loanwords, with words related to religion and trade constituting the largest groups in number. Many Arabic loanwords have disappeared from active use in the past 70 years, especially in the Hausa language that has a lesser period of contacts with the Arabic language.