College of Arts

The Department of English at College of Arts held a viva for a Master of Arts thesis entitled “THE PHONOLOGICAL ADAPTATION OF THE ENGLISH LOANWORDS IN KURDISH,” on September 26, 2021 in the Hall of College of Arts.The M. A. thesis submitted by the student (Rashed Rasheed Abdulrahman) in the Department of English, investigates the phonological adaptation of English loanwords into Kurdish (Badini dialect) as this area has not been systematically investigated by previous studies on Kurdish. It also examines the segmental adaptation of English phonemes that are not found in Kurdish phonemic inventory as well as the adaptation of the ill-formed syllabic structures.The main aim of this study is to identify and find out systematic patterns of the phonological adaptation that English loanwords undergo when borrowed into Kurdish. In the light of this aim, it is hypothesized that English loanwords undergo segmental and syllabic adaptation, and these adaptations are systematic.This study concludes that Kurdish has a tendency to adapt the illicit forms in the dataset rather than deleting or importing them as the rate of adaptation is 97.58%, 2.11% and 0.30% for deletion and importation, respectively.The viva committee was chaired by Prof. Dr. Muhammad Basil Al-Azzawi from Al-Noor University College and the membership of Assistant Professor Dr. Marwan Najib Tawfiq and Dr. Asmaa Amin Hussein from University of Duhok, and under the supervision and membership of Assistant Professor Dr. Anmar Hamoudi Saeed.