Pharyngealization of french loanwords in dialectal moroccan arabic: an acoustic analysis of bilingual speakers

This paper quantitatively tests the prediction that loanword adaptation occurs in bilinguals who must resolve two competing requirements: an accurate mental representation of the word from the source language and the phonological requirements of the receiving language. The prediction is that this duel requirement would result in the phonetic quality of loanwords being categorically different for bilinguals from the phonetic quality of native words in the receiving language. French loanwords into Moroccan Arabic (MA) are often borrowed with pharyngeal secondary articulation (“emphasis”), a feature which
affects the quality of adjacent vowels. To test these predictions, French-MA bilingual production of native and borrowed MA words and analyzed. The results of this study indicate evidence of this duel requirement for bilinguals.