Keywords

1 Introduction

In different societies, when different speech communities are in contact, they naturally tend to make compromise between their forms of speech (e.g., Winford, 2003, p. 2). Such contact may have different linguistic and societal outcomes but linguistic borrowing is one of the major manifestations of it. Traditionally, borrowing has been identified with lexical borrowing (Capuz, 1997, p. 87). According to Thomason (2001), contact is a cause of “any linguistic change that would have been less likely to occur outside a particular contact situation” (p. 62).

Haugen (1950, pp. 214–215) believes that three types of lexical borrowing can be distinguished from each other: loanword, loan blend, and loan shift. In loanword, both form and meaning are transferred; in loan blend, only one part of the word is transferred and the other part is native; and in loan shift, only the meaning is copied from the other language and the elements are native.

In lexical borrowing, the language that acquires the loanwords is called the recipient language, and the one which serves as the source of the loanwords is called the donor language. A loanword can be defined as a word which is transferred completely with form and meaning from the donor language to the recipient one.

Treffers-Daller (2010) believes that it is not easy to define “borrowing” because researchers have used different terminologies to refer to various language contact phenomena, still he assumes Thomason and Kaufman’s (1988, p. 37) definition of this phenomena was a very influential one in the past decade. Their definition is as follows:

Borrowing is the incorporation of foreign features into a group’s native language by speakers of that language: the native language is maintained but is changed by the addition of the incorporated features.

Other scholars like Haugen (1950), Weinreich (1953), Van Coetsem (1988), Clyne (1967, 2003), and Johanson (1993) have also given some definitions for borrowing, some of them are close to the definition of Thomason and Kaufman’s and some are not. In some of them, other terminologies like “transference” and “code-copying” instead of “borrowing” have been used. However, there are other researchers like Poplack (1980), Poplack and Meechan (1995), and Grosjean (1988, 1995, 1997) who hold this view that it is necessary to distinguish borrowing from other terminologies like “transfer” and “code-switching” which are the other results of language contact (Treffers-Daller, 2010).

By considering various topics discussed in the previous research, the present research aims at studying basic vocabulary loanwords in all nine bilingual villages of Ahmad-Abad division in the Mashhad city of Khorasan Razavi province in the northeastern of Iran.

The languages which are spoken in these villages are as follows:

  1. 1.

    Turkic and Persian in three villages

  2. 2.

    Baluchi and Persian in three villages

  3. 3.

    Arabic and Persian in two villages

  4. 4.

    Turkmen and Persian in one village

These languages and cultures are widely distributed in the Gulf area, for example in Iraq, Turkmens, Arabs, in Arab Gulf countries, dominantly Arabic, in Afghanistan Balochi, etc. The current case study provides a foundation for further similar studies by considering outlier societies and languages in northeastern Iran which so far is overlooked. Because of intense contact between the two speech communities in each above-mentioned villages, lexical borrowing may happen according to Thomason and Kaufman scale and beyond their prediction, because of prolonged intense contact, also in basic vocabulary. To reach this goal, the main objective of the present study include the evaluation of whether language and social contact can lead to the borrowing of basic vocabularies in some bilingual villages in Khorasan Razavi province. Therefore, the research questions to be tackled are as follows: (1) Are the basic vocabularies borrowed in the language and social contact situation? (2) Is the amount of borrowing statistically the same in all 9 studied bilingual villages, where four different languages (Turkic, Balochi, Arabic, and Turkmen) are in contact with Persian?

2 Research Methods

This research is descriptive analytical and is a field study, based on an original survey on natural linguistic data of the mentioned languages. Through this analysis, the cases of lexical borrowing in the mentioned data have been specified. Then the number of contact-induced Persian words in each category is expressed statistically for the above mentioned four languages separately. The data of this research had been collected from 19 informants, all of whom were men between 20 to 65 years old. Twelve people out of 19 were illiterate and seven were literate. Their occupations were carpet weaving, agriculture, and animal husbandry, and most of them were farmers.

The interviewees of the Iran Linguistic Atlas Database from which the data of this study were extracted are both female and male. It is a coincidence that the interviewees whose linguistic data were used in this study are all male, but this is in the interest of the purpose of this study because it provides the same background for the study of the effect of Persian language on its neighboring language in each studied village. The data have been extracted from the database of Iran Linguistic Atlas project (ILA) compiling at research institute for cultural heritage and tourism. The data of the mentioned project have been gathered in two phases, the first phase in 1970’s and the second in 2000’s, via face to face tape-recorded interviews with the native speakers of Iran’s rural areas, using a questionnaire consisting of words and sentences.

The data for the present study—extracted from the ILA’s database—consists of Turkic, Balochi, Arabic, and Turkmen equivalences for every fifty-eight basic words in the ILA’s questionnaire: kinship terms (17 items), the terms related to the nature including the words for animals, plants, and weather (25 items), the terms for body parts (3 items), and the terms for small numerals (13 items). The data have been carefully transcribed in IPA alphabet first, and then analyzed based on the present study’s theoretical framework.

3 Theoretical Issues

Borrowing leads to linguistic elements transferring or copying from one language to another. In language contact, lexical borrowing occupies a central role and occurs more than syntactic and phonological ones. In fact, words are the first elements that enter the recipient language. According to Weinreich (1953, p. 56), as words in one language are more loosely structured than grammar and phonemics, therefore they are more likely to be borrowed. However, in the case of long-term cultural pressure from source-language speakers on the borrowing-language speakers, bilingualism, syntactic, and phonological borrowing may also occur (Thomason & Kaufman, 1988, p. 37).

Some researchers propose hierarchies for borrowing elements in contact situation. For instance, Thomason and Kaufman (1988) have presented different levels of language contact situations in which borrowing occurs in different elements (see below under theoretical framework for more details).

Even within lexical borrowing, some elements are more readily borrowed than others. Myers-Scotton (2002) believes that among the words, nouns are borrowed easier than verbs because they receive thematic roles and do not break up the sentence structure but verbs are the thematic role assigners and they dominate other elements in the sentence (p. 240).

Different cultures have different attitudes toward borrowing. Some cultures are purist and their languages have very few loanwords (Haspelmath, 2008, p. 52).

Some great linguists like Müller (1875), Paul (1886), Schmidt (1872), and Schuchardt (1884) have studied language contact in nineteenth century (Clyne, 1987, p. 453). In twentieth century, the subject was addressed by Sapir (1921), Bloomfield (1933), and other structuralist. The scholars dealt with the topic from historical linguistic and sociolinguistic viewpoints. In addition, some researchers focused on specific geographic areas of contact linguistics. New important studies in this field referred to Weinreich’s (1953) and Haugen’s (1950, 1953) workings. They have studied language contact from both linguistic, sociocultural, and psychological perspectives. Weinreich’s book has shown the importance of language contact for explanation of linguistic changes (Thomason, 2006, p. 340). But the strongest recent tendencies for researching the subject comes from Thomason and Kaufman’s (1988) book. They have attempted to lay bases of typology of contact outcomes and an empirical/theoretical framework for analyzing them (Winford, 2003, pp. 6–9).

A few scholars have argued that language contact is the sole source of language variation and change, and some believe that language contact is responsible only for lexical changes and minor structural changes. According to Yaron (2009, p. 149), gaps in the structural inventory of recipient language and the prestige of donor language are two most frequent motivations for structural borrowing. Winford (2003, pp. 11–22) believes that there are three kinds of contact situations which involve three different linguistic phenomena: (1) language maintenance; (2) language shift; and (3) creation of new contact languages. In language maintenance, the speakers preserve their speech but the language changes occur on the lexicon and structure from the external language with which the language is in contact. Borrowing, structural diffusion, and code-switching are the result of such kind of language contacts. In second contact situation, contact between different linguistic groups may partially or totally lead to language shift. The outcomes of the third contact situation are creation of pidgins, creoles, and bilingual mixed languages.

Filppula et al. (2008, p. 254) predicts that maintenance of the two (or more) languages usually leads to heavy lexical borrowing, especially in a prolonged and intensive contact.

Although both linguistic factors and social factors are important in determining the linguistic results of contact, it should be noted that social factors outweigh linguistic factors in predicting the linguistic results of contact. Linguistic factors, though important, are easily overridden by social factors. Thomason (2006) mentions that no matter how the donor language differs typologically from the receiving language, with intense and prolonged contact any feature can be transferred from one to other (p. 345). The type of sociohistorical conditions in a contact situation may also affect the nature of contact influences (Filppula et al., 2008, p. 2).

According to Thomason (2001, p. 10), the most common result of language contact is that language change occurs in some or all of them. She believes that at least one of the languages exert some influence on the other and the most common type of influence is the borrowing of words. (p. 12). As mentioned earlier, the degree of borrowability of words are different and some words are transferred more easily than others. In this regard, a distinction has been proposed between basic and non-basic words; the former resist to borrowing (Hock & Joseph, 1996, p. 257). It should be noted that basic words have not been usually defined by the researchers in their works, and they have referred to the list of “basic” words by Swadesh for it (cf. Thomason & Kaufman, 1988). The list proposed by Swadesh is based on intuitions and not on any systematic research (Thomason, 2001, pp. 71–72).

According to Swadesh (1952), basic words are core vocabularies that in some extent resist to be borrowed. These words are concepts which are ‘generic’ in the sense and represent objects or ideas that accompany human independently of their specific environment. Names of body parts, kin words, body-related activities, pronouns, interrogatives, and words for nature and geography are considered as basic words. Since the basic words exist in every human community, there would no need to borrow them from languages of neighboring communities (Yaron, 2009, p. 166).

Thomason (2010, p. 36) believes that in the receiving language, if the speakers are fluent in the giving language, the predominant interference features are lexical elements which belong to non-basic vocabulary, later under increasingly more intense contact situations, structural items, and basic vocabulary may be borrowed from the donor language.

Here we will talk about the different kinds of contact situations in which different levels of borrowing occur. According to Thomason and Kaufman (1988, pp. 74–75), there are five scales of intensity of contact which they believe the boundaries between them are fuzzy (p. 77): (1) casual contact; (2) slightly more intense contact; (3) more intense contact; (4) strong cultural pressure; and (5) very strong cultural pressure.

The first one of the above refers to the situation in which there is the minimum cultural pressure. Thomason and Kaufman expect only lexical borrowing (only non-basic vocabularies) in this condition (p. 77). In the second and third situations, function words like conjunctions, adverbial particles, ad-positions, and minor phonological, syntactic, and lexical semantic features are borrowed. Furthermore derivational and inflectional affixes may enter the borrowing language. From the third situation, personal and demonstrative pronouns and low numerals which belong to the basic vocabulary start to be transferred from the donor language to the recipient one. In strong cultural pressure conditions, major structural features are borrowed which cause relatively little typological change, so borrowed inflectional affixes and categories are added to the native words. The phonological borrowings in this stage are more extensive than previous stages. Under very strong cultural pressure, in the fifth stage, borrowing the major structural features that cause significant typological disruption may take place. Morphophonemic rules are added and phonetic changes may occur. The morphology may change from flexional toward agglutinative one (pp. 74–76). According to the above scale the more intense the contact, the more features can be borrowed.

Thomason (2006, p. 345) believes it is predictable that based on the mentioned scale, basic vocabularies are not borrowed before non-basic vocabularies and inflectional morphology is not borrowed before derivational morphology. Sometimes the out-of-scale borrowings may occur in exceptional occasions. The reason is the close typological congruence between the source and receiving languages which facilitate the borrowing in spite of less intense contact conditions.

Scholars have different views about the borrowing hierarchy. Romaine (1995, p. 64), for instance, predicts that morphology will be borrowed before syntax, while Thomason and Kaufman (1988, p. 345) predict the opposite borrowing order. Bowden (2005, p. 621) believes that nouns are more borrowable than other parts of speech. In the present research, Thomason and Kaufman’s (1988) is regarded.

Thomason and Kaufman (1988) stated that in their survey “cultural pressure” means the combination of social factors like prestige, or economical forces that promotes borrowing and make bilingualism necessary (p. 77). Social factors outweigh linguistic factors in predicting the linguistic outcomes of contact. In fact, linguistic factors are important for transferring the linguistic features from one language to another one but as mentioned earlier, the social factors override them. For example, typological distance between the donor language and recipient language affects the diffusion of linguistic elements but intense contact situation is enough by itself for transferring the features from one language to the other no matter how typologically different the two languages are (Thomason, 2006, pp. 344–345).

Thomason (2006) believes that under the conditions of intense contact it is inevitable to have contact-induced changes. However, she asserted that this is not a safe assumption because there are some bilingual speech communities whose members do not engage in lexical borrowing (p. 344).

4 Data Analysis

Among the words and phrases included in the ILA questionnaire, fifty-eight basic words have been extracted. These words include kinship terms, natural terms, body parts terms, and small numbers.

The English equivalent of the extracted basic words from ILA questionnaire is presented in the Tables 21.2, 21.3, 21.4 and 21.5. As it was mentioned before, there are 17 items in kinship category; 25 items are related to the nature including the words for animals, plants, and weather; and the terms for body parts are 3 and the terms for small numerals are 13.

5 Results and Discussions

The detailed data analysis of Turkic, Balochi, Arabic, and Turkman varieties which are spoken in nine bilingual villages of Ahmad-Abad division in the Mashhad city (Khorasan Razavi province) along with Persian is presented below.

All data from the bilingual villages are discussed separately and shown in the related tables.

6 Turkic and Persian

The Table 21.5 shows that, in the all three Turkic-Persian bilingual villages, the most borrowing cases are in the two categories of kinship terms and natural terms. In the other two categories, no borrowing has been found. As McMahon (1994, p. 204) stated, unrelated languages are less likely to borrow from each other, but the case of Turkic and Persian which are typologically unrelated languages verifies that lexical borrowing could also occur in these unrelated languages in prolonged intense contact and as mentioned before, social factors predominant linguistic factors in the linguistic consequences of contact.

It has been stated (Yaron, 2009, p. 166) that since some concepts, including close kin, exist in every human community, there is no need to borrow them from another language. But as Table 21.1 indicates, not only distant relative terms, but also close kin are included in the borrowed list of the Turkic variety of these villages.

Table 21.1 Basic words borrowed from Persian (in the Turkic variety)
Full size table

7 Balochi and Persian

In Balochi-Persian bilingual villages, the most examined lexical borrowing cases are in the natural word category: 7, 8, and 10 words out of 25 natural words are cases of borrowing in the three villages. In the body part category, only one case of borrowing in one village can be seen and the other two villages have no cases of it. Considering the category of numerals, no borrowing could be mentioned, because all the studied items in Balochi are the same as the Persian. The close family relationship between the two languages may cause this amount of similarity in this category. Jahani and Korn (2009, p. 658) studied varieties of Balochi language in case of numerals they also mention that they are the same as Persian except in some pronunciations (Table 21.2).

Table 21.2 Basic words borrowed from Persian (in the Balochi variety)
Full size table

8 Arabic and Persian

The Arabic-Persian bilingual villages demonstrate the least lexical borrowing cases. In the two villages, only three and four cases of borrowing in kinship terms are recognized, and just one case of borrowing in the natural terms in one village. No borrowings in the numerals in one village and only three in the other are seen. In case of Arabic language, the matter of borrowing in typologically unrelated languages is true. As mentioned in the case of Turkic language, in these cases social factors are more important than linguistic factors in determining borrowing cases. As Table 21.3 indicates in the Arabic variety of these villages, close kin terms (father, mother, etc.) have not been borrowed.

Table 21.3 Basic words borrowed from Persian (in the Arabic variety)
Full size table

9 Turkmen and Persian

In the only one Turkmen-Persian bilingual village of the region, just one lexical borrowing in the kinship terms and five in the natural terms are seen and in the two other categories, namely body parts and small numerals, no cases can be observed. Turkmen and Persian are typologically unrelated languages; therefore, it is predicted that the cases of borrowing would be less. Here, apparently, the linguistic factor has played a more important role than the social factor (Table 21.4).

Table 21.4 Basic words borrowed from Persian (in the Turkmen variety)
Full size table

In this study, the borrowing of basic vocabularies are examined in four languages including, Turkic, Balochi, Arabic, and Turkmen in nine bilingual villages of Ahmad-Abad division in the Mashhad city of Khorasan Razavi province in the eastern north of Iran. In each of these villages, one of the above languages are spoken alongside Persian which is the official language of the country and therefore superior and prestigious. The data have been extracted from the database of Iran Linguistic Atlas project (ILA) compiling at research institute for cultural heritage and tourism since 1970’s. The informants whose data have been used in this research had been face to face interviewed via a questionnaire in 1970’s. They were all men between 20 to 65 years old and almost illiterate.

Many researchers believe that the borrowing does not take place in the basic vocabulary. However, an examination of the linguistic data in these bilingual villages shows that, contrary to their beliefs, the borrowing process has taken place. For a summary of the results, see Table 21.5.

Table 21.5 The average of lexical borrowing in each language
Full size table

Figure 21.1 is a visualization of Table 21.5 and it shows that among various societies, the Turks are more prone to lexicon change, the next one are the Balochi society, afterward, Arab society of the region, and finally the Turkmen. The reason that the Turks borrowed more basic vocabularies is that they are more dominant and they have tendency to the center of administration. Having a proper job and official positions require a good command of Persian. Turkish families strongly stated that it is important for them to speak to their children from early ages in Persian. They do not like their children to have a non-Persian accent and that matters in their schooling and accordingly in academia. Basically, the families are doing suicide on their language and identity. In the second place, those Balochi are dwelling in northeastern Iran show a similar tendency but less than the Turkish communities. For example, the data for Balochi society in southeastern Iran show that they are more conservative than the northeastern ones. Those who live in northeastern Iran are more involved in official jobs and responsibilities and they have more integration and communication with Persian and other societies. In general, the Baloch in southeastern Iran are less educated and there is less opportunity to be involved in the official job positions and people are mostly smugglers or they are doing jobs which need no official education. Although in the northeastern Iran the multi- and bilingual societies trigger the change, Arabs show a very low effect on this respect. However, the degree of change is still significant because they constitute a very close and conservative society. The current effects can be mainly due to the social contact between the Arabs with other minorities in the northeastern Iran, education, and the mass media. Contrary to all previous societies, Turkmens show a very limited influence on the basic vocabularies. Although they are from the same language family of Turkic, they seem to be very closed. In general, Turkmens have the very low intercultural marriages and they are mostly dealing with farm husbandry and land working rather than official and administrative jobs. In addition, in terms of identity, the Turkmen they distinguish them from other neighboring societies more radical than the Arabs and Baloch. The approximate 10% change is mainly due to education and mass media influence of Persian in the new generations.

Fig. 21.1
A bar graph with the percentage values for the following villages. Turkic-Persian, 29.88. Balochi-Persian, 20.10. Arabic-Persian, 9.45. Turkmen-Persian, 10.34.

Borrowing statistics in the studied billingual villages

Full size image

10 Conclusion

This study has surveyed several societies in northeastern Iran which are linguistically very distinctive. These societies include Turks, Arabs, Baloch, and Turkmen which are represented in a wider Gulf geography. Basic vocabularies are selected because any change in this linguistic category may reveal a deeper social contact and change in different communities.

The reason is that the borrowing process of basic vocabulary differs mostly with non-basic vocabulary in terms of resistance. Any change in the basic vocabularies is not usually motivated by the need to fill the gaps of the recipient language or to introduce new concepts in it easily. Any change in the basic vocabulary needs that the donor language generally possesses equivalent terms of the borrowed ones, but prefers to substitute the labels used for the same concepts from the donor language.

In theoretical studies, the general belief is that basic vocabularies are more resistance to borrowability. The main concept lies behind the strong communication and ties between different generations on this aspect. In each society, generally terms related to father and mother are acquired very early in the childhood and they are mapped in the black box of mind. During the span of life, children routinize such terms due to high intensity of usage with their relatives and people who dwelling in the same neighborhood. In spite of some theoretical explanations about the low level engagement of basic vocabulary in borrowing process, the results indicate that the borrowing has also taken place in basic vocabulary and the cases are not very few.

This shows that due to societal and linguistic contact over centuries the speech communities had more integration into each other’s culture and they adopted more vocabularies to each other’s need. The changes have occurred more in kinship terms and more or less in natural and body part terms in the said bilingual villages. Regarding numerals, the case is somehow different, that is, in Turkic and Turkmen no borrowing has taken place and in Arabic only in one out of two villages just 3 out of 13 numbers have been borrowed. The case in Balochi needs more survey, because all the numerals are the same as the Persian. This may root more in the origin of this language than contact with the Persian. This entails that there are deep rooted structures in the respective societies which can be due to interreligious, intermarriages, education, job possibilities, or mass media. The strong impact of Persian and the lingua franca role of Persian has intensified such deep change and the new generations adopted new basic vocabularies. Various reasons include, for example, families wish to have children without vernacular accent. The main reason is that their children can have a better education if they speak Persian. This can influence their future career if they want to study in the academia or to have administrative jobs. Moreover, the families also try to prevent their children of being considered ridiculous at school which can have negative psychological impact on them. Such reasons which are directly mentioned by the families let them to start killing their mother tongue and to replace it with the vocabularies of a more dominant language which is Persian in this case.

Bilingualism and even multilingualism are widespread in many regions of Iran. Persian as a superstrate and prestigious language serves as the donor language in each region. It is not surprising that substrate languages borrow many words, including basic vocabulary from it.

Different cultures have different behavior in the borrowing process. Therefore, different communities may have various attitudes toward lexical borrowing. The findings of this study shows that although all of the attested languages in the article borrowed some basic vocabulary from Persian, the number of loanwords are not the same.