A Linguistic Analysis of Computer- and Internet-Related Terms as Seen in the Language of Egyptian Youth

Abstract

With the growth of new technologies, such as computer, Internet, mobile phones, etc., there has been a vast number of English words that are related to computer and Internet that entered the Arabic language, especially in the last 25 years of the 20th century. Therefore, this paper gives an overview of the latest borrowings from English that are related to communication technology and examines the attitude of Egyptian youth towards the presence of English in their Egyptian Arabic (EA) language. It aims to show to what extent these loanwords are adapted to the structure of the Egyptian Arabic language, from a linguistic perspective. The results show that EA shows a moderate and practical tendency in dealing with lexical borrowing from English. Most of the cases of borrowed items are manipulated so that they conform to the structural (phonological, morphological, morphosyntactic, semantic) rules of EA.