Lexical borrowing and semantic changes in the Chasu speech community of Tanzania

Abstract

In Same District, Kilimanjaro, in Tanzania, there is a long-lasting contact situation with Chasu, Kiswahili and English languages. As a result, Chasu has frequently borrowed new terms and concepts from Kiswahili and English. Other studies on Chasu have concentrated on how the sociolinguistic variables such as social class, gender, style, age and educational levels explain the occurrence of lexical borrowing and code-switching in the multilingual Chasu area (Sebonde, 2012) and the adaptation of loan words into Chasu vocabulary (Msuya and Mreta, 2019). Any study on the semantic change of the borrowed lexical items in Chasu is less prominent. This study has partly dealt with that. Data were collected through recording natural speech, transcribing and making a list of borrowed lexical items, and checking with the informants through interviews for meaning interpretation and confirmation. The study is guided by the cognitive lexical semantic framework (Geeraerts, 2010) in examining lexical borrowing and semantic change in Chasu. The study reveals that religious, medical, sports and games, clothing, agriculture, education and names for modern terms are frequently borrowed from English and Kiswahili. The findings reveal the incidence of additive borrowings, lexical replacement, lexical loss and semantic broadening and narrowing in borrowed words in Chasu.