Morphological Adaptation of English Verb Roots among Algerian EFL Learners: Towards a Contact- Induced Language Change

Abstract

With English becoming the lingua franca of the globalized world, students are avidly eager to learn it virtually regardless of the field of study they are enrolled in; the current generation of Algerian students constitutes no exception. Indeed, their interest in learning English is undoubtedly leaving remarkably visible traces in their daily conversations. As a consequence, their Algerian Arabic is becoming, in the course of learning a new language -English in this case-, subject to change not only in terms of using Anglicism and code switching but also in terms of using adapted borrowing. By way of example, it is becoming increasingly common to hear infiltrations similar in principle to /laɪkɪ:tu/ as an affirmative reply to: ‘Do you like -something masculine-? or /mæ-laɪkɪtu:-ʃ/ in case of a negative reply. In an attempt to identify the various patterns of such embedded words in Algerian Arabic, a survey has been carried out with EFL learners at Mentouri University. The results revealed that English verb roots are inflected by the same tense, subject, object, gender, number, command and negation denoting markers, inherent in Algerian Arabic.