Ekegusii Phonemic Inventory Constraints on Borrowing: An Optimality Perspective

Sound adaptation is a phenomenon that languages cannot escape in borrowing. This is because phonemic inventories differ significantly. This paper explores how Ekegusii native speakers map foreign segments from English so that they conform to the inventory constraints of Ekegusii.  In this paper, couched in Optimality Theory (OT), it is demonstrated that English vowels are mapped to Ekegusii front and back vowels respectively constrained by shared features while consonant adaptation is guided by shared features as well. This is to ensure that segments that are unmarked cross linguistically are adapted over the marked ones. OT’s markedness constraints largely dominate the faithfulness constraints because modifications must occur when English loanwords are different from their Ekegusii counterparts in the mapping process.