Grammatical Gender Marking of English Loanwords in Ng’aturukana

International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume IV, Issue IX, September 2020 | ISSN 2454–6186

Grammatical Gender Marking of English Loanwords in Ng’aturukana

Celestine Nkieny Tioko, Henry Simiyu Nandelenga, Joshua Mulinge Itumo
Department of Literature, Linguistics and Foreign Languages, Kenyatta University, Nairobi-Kenya

Abstract: Borrowing of words is one of the inevitable outcomes of the multilingual and multicultural societies across the globe. This paper sought to answer two questions. First, what grammatical genders do English words acquire when borrowed into Ng’aturukana? Second, what arguments exist in Ng’aturukana that model the assignment of specific grammatical genders to the borrowed words? Data were drawn from local radio stations discussions broadcasting in Ng’aturukana and from native speaker’s intuition. Another competent native speaker verified and validated the data. The grammatical gender assigned and the explanations guiding in the assignment were noted and explained. From the analyses, the paper reports that nominal loans were assigned either the masculine or the feminine gender when borrowed into Ng’aturukana. It also established that the Turkana native knowledge of concepts, uses of the referred objects, specific gender (people) associated with the objects and the general activities under which the referred objects are used determined the specific gender assigned to a loan term. The paper is expected to contribute to the existing discourse on the borrowing of words phenomenon and may act as a basis through which other gender marking languages can be investigated and compared.

Key words: Borrowing, Loanwords, Grammatical gender, Ng’aturukana, English

I. INTRODUCTION.

This paper investigated the grammatical gender assignment of the English loanwords borrowed into Ng’aturukana. Grammatical gender has been argued to be one of the most stable features of languages (Corbet 1991; Di Garbo, 2014). Loanword borrowing has become common in many languages due to the high rate of multilingualism and multiculturalism embraced across the globe. Ng’aturukana is a gender sensitive language in its noun, preposition and pronoun groups (Dimmendaal, 1983). Prior researches conducted on Ng’aturukana have noted the complex nature of Ng’aturukana, especially on grammatical gender marking. A more interesting scenario occurs when it borrows words from the other languages. English nouns occur as neuter. Ng’aturukana, on the other hand, assigns the masculine and feminine genders prefixationally. Neuter gender is associated with the diminutive cases in Ng’aturukana.

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