Indirect Influence of English on Kiswahili: The Case of Multiword Duplicates between Kiswahili and English

Some proverbs, idioms, nominal compounds, and slogans duplicate in form and meaning between several languages. An example of these between German and English is Liebe auf den ersten Blick and “love at first sight” (Flippo, 2009), whereas, an example between Kiswahili and English is uchaguzi ulio huru na haki and “free and fair election.” Duplication of these strings of words between languages that are as different in descent and typology as Kiswahili and English is irregular. On this ground, Kiswahili academies and a number of experts of Kiswahili assumed – prior to the present study – that the Kiswahili versions of the expressions are the derivatives from their English congruent counterparts. The assumption nonetheless lacked empirical evidence and also discounted other potential causes of the phenomenon, i.e. analogical extension, nativism and cognitive metaphoricalization (Makkai, 1972; Land, 1974; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980b; Ruhlen, 1987; Lakoff, 1987; Gleitman and Newport, 1995). Out of this background, we assumed an academic obligation of empirically investigating what causes this formal and semantic duplication of strings of words (multiword expressions) between English and Kiswahili to a degree beyond chance expectations. In this endeavour, we employed checklist to 24, interview to 43, online questionnaire to 102, translation test to 47 and translationality test to 8 respondents. Online questionnaire respondents were from 21 regions of Tanzania, whereas, those of the rest of the tools were from Zanzibar, Dar es Salaam, Pwani, Lindi, Dodoma and Kigoma. Complementarily, we analysed the Chemnitz Corpus of Swahili (CCS), the Helsinki Swahili Corpus (HSC), and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) for clues on the sources and trends of expressions exhibiting this characteristic between Kiswahili and English. Furthermore, we reviewed the Bible, dictionaries, encyclopaedia, books, articles, expressions lists, wikis, and phrase books in pursuit of etymologies, and histories of concepts underlying the focus expressions. Our analysis shows that most of the Kiswahili versions of the focus expressions are the function of loan translation and rendition from English. We found that economic, political and technological changes, mostly induced by liberalization policy of the 1990s in Tanzania, created lexical gaps in Kiswahili that needed to be filled. We discovered that Kiswahili, among other means, fill such gaps through loan translation and loan rendition of English phrases. Prototypical examples of notions whose English labels Kiswahili has translated word for word are such as “human rights”, “free and fair election”, “the World Cup” and “multiparty democracy”. We can conclude that Kiswahili finds it easier and economical to translate the existing English labels for imported notions rather than innovating original labels for the concepts. Even so, our analysis revealed that a few of the Kiswahili duplicate multiword expressions might be a function of nativism, cognitive metaphoricalization and analogy phenomena. We, for instance, observed that formulation of figurative meanings follow more or less similar pattern across human languages – the secondary meanings deriving from source domains. As long as the source domains are common in many human\'s environment, we found it plausible for certain multiword expressions to spontaneously duplicate between several human languages. Academically, our study has demonstrated how multiword expressions, which duplicate between several languages, can be studied using primary data, corpora, documentary review and observation. In particular, the study has designed a framework for studying sources of the expressions and even terminologies for describing the phenomenon. What\'s more, the study has collected a number of expressions that duplicate between Kiswahili and English languages, which other researchers can use in similar studies