German Lexical Items Among Iraqi-Arabic-German Bilinguals: Code-Switches or Borrowings?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24425/for.2018.124682Abstract
The question of what is the difference between borrowing and code-switching has attracted the attention of scholars far and wide and gave at the same time rise to a plethora of publications in order to draw a boundary between these two terms. In the most recent of these publications (Grosjean 1982, Poplack & Meechan 1995 & 1998; to name but a few), it has been often argued that borrowings are donor-language items that are integrated in the grammar of the recipient language at a community level, while code-switches take place at individual level and they retain the grammar of the language from which they derive. However, the current political and economic uncertainties in various regions of the world have been found to cause mass refugee movements to conflict-free places, where contact between newcomers and locals usually lead to some kind of linguistic inter influencing. The current study discusses the contact induced German-origin lone lexical items used by Iraqi-Arabic-speaking refugees in Germany. It is the aim of this study to show whether or not these lexical items can be considered as code-switches or established borrowings. The data I am analyzing come from spontaneous and elicited conversations of the first and second wave of Iraqi- Arabic-speaking refugees and asylum seekers to Germany as well as from online- and paper-pencil-questionnaires.
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