Dialectal variation in lexical borrowings in Dangme

This paper investigates dialectal variation in lexical borrowings in Dangme, a language spoken in Southern Ghana. The language is in contact with four languages from which it has borrowed: Ewe, Ga, Akan and English. Dangme has seven dialects (Adaa, Gbugblaa, Yilɔ Krobo, Manya Krobo, Nugo, Sɛ and Osudoku), but this study concerns lexical borrowings into the first four. Although each dialect is in direct contact with English, the same thing cannot be said about their contact with the three Ghanaian languages; while Adaa is in contact with Ewe and Gbugblaa with Ga, both Yilɔ Krobo and Manya Krobo are in contact with Akan and, to some extent, Ewe. A major research question explored is whether and to what extent borrowings into a dialect from a given source language remain localized or are transferred to the other dialects. Eighty (80) respondents, 20 each from the four dialects considered, were purposively sampled to participate in the data collection process. Elicitation was the main instrument used and it was complemented with sociolinguistic interviews aimed at obtaining social information about each participant. It was found that while most Akan and English lexical borrowings have become integrated in all the four dialects of Dangme, this is not the case with lexical borrowings from Ga and Ewe. Most Ga borrowings are found only in Gbugblaa and most Ewe borrowings are found only in Adaa and, to some extent, Manya Krobo dialects. However, few borrowings from Ewe are also cross-dialectal. It is also found that some of the lexical borrowings still compete with their Dangme equivalents while some others have replaced their equivalents. The theoretical framework employed is the Variationist Sociolinguistics Theory.