LEXICAL BORROWING: A CASE STUDY OF BASSA LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

Language development involves such deliberate systematic activities as a conscious attempt e.g. by a government or a community to promote one language or one form of a language over another. This is done through codification or the planning of specific vocabulary. It also involves designing a standard orthography, dictionary, primers written texts and a meta language etc. Factors responsible for this activity in most African languages are inadequacy of languages with current use, domination of foreign languages. The evidence of contact made by two or more languages is borrowing. When people from different linguistic backgrounds come in contact, they tend to exchange cultures and languages, they tend to make use of words from each other's languages in order to refer things, activities or processes, ways of behaviour, organization etc which do not exist in their native vocabularies. Some of the foreign words employed get intergraded into languages' vocabularies, but are altered in pronunciation in order to adapt to the phonological patterns of the language acquiring them. This process has help language to develop their inadequate vocabularies. This work focuses on the role of borrowing English words for the development of Bassa language.