The phonological behaviour of nasal segment in English loanwords in Kelantan dialect

This paper discusses the phonological behaviour of nasal segments in English loanwords in the Kelantan dialect of Malay. It has largely been discussed in previous Malay studies that nasal segments in words are finally deleted, as in /ikan/ → [ikɛ] ‘fish’ and /jalan/ →[dʒalɛ] ‘road’. The claims made by previous studies however cannot entirely hold for English words borrowed by the dialect. Based on previous data from Shapri (1980), this paper will show that some of the loanwords obey the grammar in that some nasal segments in word-final position are deleted and some are not. The obedience to grammar can be seen in words like ‘attendant’ [itandɛ] and ‘go astern’ [gostɛ]. Meanwhile, violation of the grammar can be seen in English words like ‘canteen’, ‘agreement’, ‘accident’ and ‘cufflink’, which are realised as [kɛtɛŋ], [ɛgremiŋ], [eɁsiden] and [kaflin], respectively, when they are borrowed by the dialect. How obedience and violation occur with loanwords will be accounted for in this paper by adopting a constraint-based analysis, Optimality theory.