Multilingual hybridization in Somali noun phrases: Morphosyntactic integration of Arabic, English, and Italian borrowings across written, spoken, and dspoken and digital registers

Abstract

This study explores hybridization in Somali noun phrases by analyzing the structural, morphological, and sociolinguistic processes involved in the integration of foreign lexical items into Somali syntactic frames. Drawing on written texts, spoken discourse, and diaspora digital communication, the study analyzes a purposively selected sample of 150 nonduplicate hybrid noun-phrase tokens comprising 75 Arabic-origin items (50.0%), 53 English-origin items (35.3%), and 22 Italian-origin items (14.7%). This tri-register design enables direct comparison of borrowing and morphosyntactic integration across contemporary written, spoken, and digital contexts . Borrowed lexical items from Arabic, English, and Italian participate in established Somali morphological structures, particularly the two definite-article series: the k-series, based on -ka , and the t-series, based on -ta , including their phonologically conditioned surface allomorphs such as -ga and -da . Arabic-origin forms are particularly represented in the sampled religious, legal, and traditional educational contexts; English-origin forms are prominent in technological, media, modern educational, and diaspora digital contexts; and Italian-origin forms occur mainly in sampled urban, domestic, culinary, clothing-related, and historically established everyday vocabulary. Methodologically, the study combines syntactic parsing with sociolinguistic coding to distinguish structural hybridization from code-switching, classifying foreign-origin material as structurally integrated when it receives Somali morphology or enters an identifiable Somali syntactic dependency. The findings document recurring patterns of Somali morphosyntactic integration across the sampled registers while recognizing that borrowing and hybridization in Somali are established phenomena. The principal contribution therefore lies in the systematic cross-register comparison of Arabic-, English-, and Italian-origin noun-phrase patterns within a common analytical framework. At the lexical-type level, 31 of 33 English-origin types (93.9%) occur with the k-series, whereas five of six singular Italian-origin types (83.3%) occur with the t-series surface form -da ; the 22 Arabic-origin types are more evenly distributed, with 12 (54.5%) in the k-series and 10 (45.5%) in the t-series. This article-series asymmetry is a descriptive tendency within the labelled lexical-type subset and does not establish donor-language origin as the cause of article selection. The pluralization evidence is more limited: only two Italian-origin lexical pairs, boorso-da/boorso-yin-ka and goono-da/goono-yin-ka , display a singular -da versus plural -yin-ka contrast. This pattern is therefore treated as preliminary and requires testing in a larger corpus.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Social Sciences & Humanities Open, 2026 · DOI ↗