The incorporation of Swedish words into Arabic - in a Swedish-Syrian family

During the last decade Arabic has become the second most common mother tongue in Sweden, so the relationship between Swedish and Arabic is a relatively new area of interest. The purpose of this study is to examine the incorporation of Swedish words into Arabic among Arabic speakers in Sweden. The primary source is an in-depth interview of three fluent speakers of Arabic and Swedish (with origins in Damascus, Syria). My aim was to examine which Swedish words are used in Arabic by Arabic speakers in Sweden and how they are used. Regarding which words are used, my hypothesis was that I would find support for the pattern of how word borrowing functions in general, i.e. that the language follows power; loan words tend to be borrowed from powerful languages and cultures. Thus, I intended to examine whether a similar tendency would also be demonstrated in this study, that is, if the individual L2-words used while speaking L1 were associated with power and authorities. The interview manifested an overrepresentation of words that could be associated with power, but no clear support that this was a correlative relationship. Other factors, such as the simultaneous introduction of the word and the phenomenon, were found to be more plausible. With regards to how words are used, my proposition was that the person having left the L1-environment (in this case Syria) at the oldest age would, in analogy with the prevalent notion concerning L1-attrition in general, incorporate the L2 into the L1 to a greater extent than other interviewees. The study found that the interviewee who had left her L1-environment at oldest age did adapt the Swedish words to Arabic phonology and morphology to a greater extent