The phonetic evolution of Gallicisms of Egyptian Arabic

Document Type : Original Article

Author

French Language Department, Faculty of Al-Alsun, Beni-Suef University

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to focus on phonetic evolution of Gallicisms in Egyptian Arabic. During the Modern Renaissance of Egypt, hundreds of French words were borrowed by Egyptian speakers in many fields of life. These loanwords are adapted to the phonetic rules of the recipient language. It is a question of full adaptation to the point that the monolinguals may ignore the foreign origin and don’t know their equivalents in Arabic. The current study contains two parts. The first part covers the changes of acoustic image of Gallicisms; these changes refer mainly to the interaction between phonemes in the same loanword (assimilation, dissimilation and metathesis), and the distinct phonological system of recipient language. The second part explores the socio-historical conditions under which this borrowing had happened. More specifically, we tend to focus on the nature of French-Egyptian contact in the 19th and 20th centuries and demonstrate the linguistic competence of borrowers.

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