English Loan Words in the Spoken Arabic of the Southern Part of Iraq: a Sociolinguistic Study

In language studies, the term ‘borrowing’ is commonly employed to refer to the linguistic process wherein a certain foreign linguistic element is taken over and incorporated into another different language. and such a linguistic process may occur on all levels of language. it sometimes takes the form of lexical items which are linguistically familiar as loan words and are regarded as nonnative words until they become part of the lexicon of the borrowing language. bloomfield (1933: 444) defines ‘borrowing’, in its linguistic sense, as “the adoption of features which differ from those of the main tradition”. this definition has been set to comprehend two different implications for this term, which bloomfield has described as ‘dialect borrowing’ and ‘cultural borrowing’ (ibid). however, the term ‘borrowing’ is chiefly used to indicate the second sense, which implies that the borrowed features come from a different language. robins (1964: 309) explicitly refers to this sense when he states that word borrowing is “the taking over of words from foreign languages”1. gleason (1955: 397) also tends to maintain this sense when he describes borrowing as “the copying of a linguistic item from speakers of another speech form”, and then states that “the most evident instances are those in which the two forms of speech are quite different”. in the course of the present study, the term ‘borrowing’ is to be used in this implication only.