Book Description
Newly available outside Africa, this is a comprehensive survey of loanwords that have been incorporated into three Zambian languages, commonly known as Lozi, Nyanja and Tonga. The book gives a list of loanwords from African and European languages into Zambia's major languages. The author additionally introduces the language and linguistic environment in Zambia. Specific to the issue of loanwords, the study raises questions about whether loanwords can be regarded as integral to the language in question; and whether besides the words recorded in this study, there are other foreign lexical items that deserve equal recognition as bona fide loanwords. The author anticipates that in the longer term this kind of information will materially assist the assemblage of data that will lead to the modernisation of Zambian languages, knowledge about the languages, in their spoken and written forms as living cultures, and the prospects of their ever expanding vocabularies.