Gender assignment in loanwords in Jordanian Arabic

Abstract

This study examines gender assignment in 531 English loanwords in Jordanian Arabic. Results show that the most common gender in the corpus is the masculine and the most important factor that determines the gender of the adapted loanword is the phonological/phonetic form of the loanword while semantic factors play a minor role. Most importantly, the paper provides evidence that the masculine, which is also morphologically unmarked, is the default gender in JA and probably in Arabic in general. In other words, Jordanian Arabic native speakers perceive English loan nouns as masculine unless strong evidence suggests otherwise. The paper contributes to studies on gender assignment in both Arabic and world languages by shedding light on the mechanisms of the complicated process of gender assignment in Jordanian Arabic. The study concludes with a number of implications for gender assignment in Arabic and second language acquisition of Arabic.

Keywords:

• Gender assignment
• default gender
• Arabic
• loanwords
• Jordanian Arabic

ORCID

Mohammed Nour Abu Guba http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5007-6439

Notes

1 There are many dialects within Jordanian Arabic; for consistency, the data in this study refer to the dialect spoken in Amman, the capital of Jordan.

2 Except for three nouns, namely ‘lord’, ‘madam’ and ‘prince’.

3 This is usually raised to /e/ except after guttural sounds, i.e. pharyngeals, laryngeals and emphatics.

4 The Standard Arabic feminine marker /aaʔ/ appears in JA in some words, as in kibriyaaʔ ‘pride’ (f), as a result of code-switching (see Suleiman 1985; Amer et al. 2011 for more details on diglossia in JA speech community). However, this is usually shortened to /a/ in JA, as in /zarqaaʔ/ > zarga ‘blue’ (f).

5 Only one word does not follow this pattern, namely ‘antenna’ > ʔanteen, which is assigned masculine gender. Most probably, this word was introduced via Egyptian or Syrian Arabic from French as its form is very close to the French form ‘antenne’.

6 The sound feminine plural is a type of regular plural whereby the feminine suffix –(a)at is added to feminine singular nouns, e.g. sayyaara ‘a car’ > sayyaaraat ‘cars’.