English Loanwords in Iraqi Arabic

Abstract

This study is an attempt to identify the English loanwords in Iraqi Arabic. English is an international language, and due to the political, economic, technological, and media supremacy of the UK and the US during the 20th and the 21st centuries, English has a distinctive role in many languages, including the Iraqi Arabic, especially after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the internet revolution. Thus, the study aims to identify and collect academically sufficient numbers of these borrowed linguistic items to approach their borrowing from a sociolinguistic and semantic point of view. The collected data is classified based on their relation to certain groups and communities of Iraqi Arabic natives. Furthermore, the study provides explanations of the words' meanings after assimilation, which aids the study of the semantic transformations during the adaptation of the English loanwords' into Iraqi Arabic.