English loans in Swahili newspaper football language

Abstract

It has been inferred that to some extent some football terminologies tend to be cross-linguistic, stemming from the fact that many languages borrow football vocabulary from English. Thus within the field of football, the influence of English is significant. Football in Tanzania dates back to the 1920s and is becoming more and more prominent among other sports in Tanzania. Swahili football language is influenced by English in diverse ways. This paper seeks to investigate the strategies for expansion of Swahili vocabulary for the expression of football language in Tanzania by use of a corpus extracted from Swahili newspapers dated between 2006 and 2008. The data is representative of terms for player positions, football functionaries, and miscellaneous standard football related expressions and terminologies. The discussion focuses on the borrowing processes, the grammatical categories of loans items and loan types and how they fit into various linguistic phenomena of borrowing as spelt out in Winford (2003). The paper also addresses the question of standardization of borrowed football registers.
Keywords: football_language, loans, borrowing, Swahili