Linguistic effects of English on Luyia languages

Abstract

When contact occurs between two or more languages, there is bound to be some sort of language change, which can affect either of the languages concerned. The nature and extent of the linguistic change is dependant on the circumstances of the social, cultural and political relations that exist between the linguistic communities concerned. The goal of this paper is to examine the influence English has had on Luyia languages spoken in western Kenya. English has had both an intensive and extensive contact with the Kenyan speaking communities for nearly one hundred years, and due to this, there has been a considerable influence of English on Kenyan ethnic languages in all aspects of language areas. I discuss three linguistic effects in this paper: the first of such is borrowing of vocabulary from English which is phonologically adjusted to conform to the phonotactic constraints of the Luyia languages, the second is code-switching and code-mixing between English and the Luyia languages and finally language shift that has resulted to language ‘death’ in some cases.