MORPHOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF LOANWORDS IN YORÙBÁ.

ABSTRACT

The Yoruba language, prevalent in southwestern Nigeria, possesses a vast and heterogeneous vocabulary shaped by various foreign languages over time. A captivating aspect of its linguistics is the morphological assimilation of borrowed vocabulary into Yoruba. This project provides a comprehensive analysis of the morphological processes involved in the integration of loanwords into the Yoruba language. Various morphological strategies are employed, including affixation, reduplication, and phonological adaptation, to accommodate these foreign lexical items within the Yoruba linguistic system. The analysis considers how the Yoruba language retains, modifies, or reinterprets the morphological structures of loanwords to align them with the language’s native patterns and grammatical conventions. One of the objectives of this work is to examine the morphological structure of loan words in Yorùbá language and I was able to achieve that by using The Morphological Approach Framework as the theoretical framework for this and I collected data through oral interviews and from extract of materials written by some linguistics scholars. The findings of this project contribute to the understanding of language contact, borrowing, our knowledge of the morphological structure of Yorùbá, by breaking down the loan word into its constituent parts, such as prefixes, roots, suffixes, and infixes, I also saw insight into how language contact affects the language’s vocabulary. The study’s conclusions show that affixation is one of the most active morphological processes responsible for this adaptation.