Lexical borrowing in English newspapers in Bangladesh / Md. Nurul Islam

Md. , Nurul Islam (2024) Lexical borrowing in English newspapers in Bangladesh / Md. Nurul Islam. PhD thesis, Universiti Malaya.

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Abstract

Bangladesh has experienced innumerable language contact situations before and after its independence. There have been many instances of merging Urdu, Perso-Arabic, and Hindi (or Sanskrit) words with the Bengali language. As a result, articles and other write-ups in the Bangladeshi English newspapers contain many common Bengali loanwords. The aim of this study is to examine lexical innovation in Bangladeshi newspapers and to determine their functions in relation to the socio-cultural and political contexts in which they are found. The data were collected from three national dailies, namely, The Daily Star, The Independent and The News Today. This study strove to create a corpus of contact expressions in these newspapers, delineate the types of Bengali and other loanwords used in the corpus and the reasons for their use, and explore the results in relation to the language ecology. The features were analysed and interpreted using ‘a combination of two approaches’ – the World Englishes frameworks of Kachru (1988) and Strevens (1977). Hence, this study can be considered a qualitative study carried out through textual analysis. The analysis of data shows that lexical borrowing and hybridisation are the two features found in the English dailies in Bangladesh contributing to the highest number of loanwords in English and are often used by the people in different domains within Bangladesh. Moreover, these features are used to provide for ideas and concepts when there is no equivalent in the receiving language. Lexical borrowing is found in only two sub-categories – independent and reduplicating loans, each providing a variety of terms that reflect the notion of Bengaliness. The vocabularies found in different domains attest to their Bengali socio-cultural and political elements, such as references to religion, animals, festivals, traditional sports, music, culinary, clothing and so forth. Furthermore, the two sub-categories – independent and reduplicating lexical borrowings – contribute to the existence of multilingualism in Bengali-English words because they are loanwords from Bengali, Sanskrit/Hindi, Urdu and Arabic/Perso-Arabic languages. Two types of hybrid words – open and closed set – result in the very unique phenomenon of English-Bengali and Bengali-English loan blend. Furthermore, coinages are also commonly found in the Bangladeshi English newspapers and form part of the Bengali-English lexicon. In addition, English words are created with slight semantic modification. Semantic shift and blending provide the least number of lexical items in the data. The selected three English newspapers of Bangladesh use a number of acronyms in English which have unique features and contribute to a high number of loanwords in English. Overall, the seven features of language contact which have contributed to 618 loanwords are used in the English newspapers in Bangladesh. Among 618 loanwords, 25 words are codified as English words of Bengali origin by the latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. The study concludes that the Bangladeshi English newspapers exhibit a novelty at the lexical level due to the strong influence of the Bengali language and that the use of loanwords is comparable to that available in other varieties of the English language.

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