LINGUISTICS AND COMMUNICATION

Abstract

Borrowing means that words which originated in one language are now used in another language, even by people who don’t speak the SL. The study describes the feature of Oromo loan words linguistically in comparison with non-loan words. Data of the study were collected from spoken and written corpus. Written was used to gather loan words from academic primary school specifically grade five (5) to eight (8) text books written in Oromo. From a text books one hundred ten (110) loan words were gathered. Spoken corpus was a data collected from OBN Media broadcasting in Oromo. From spoken one hundred eight (108) loan words were collected. The total number of collected data for the study was two hundred seventeen (217) loan words. The data have been phonetically transcribed and qualitatively analyzed. The study found out that loan words in Oromo have linguistic properties such as phonological, morphological, syntactical and semantic change. Among the loan words, free morphemes are the most borrowable when it compared to others. Some loan words borrowed with their derivational morpheme that changes the word parts of speech especially in abstract nominative. Inflectional morphemes are not borrowed. But all loan words use Oromo inflectional morpheme for nominative, dative, objective, plurality and gender.