When Arabic Resonates in the Words of an African Language: Some Morphological and Semantic Features of Arabic Loanwords and Calques in Bambara

The present chapter aims to highlight some morphological and syntactic features of the impact of (mainly classical) Arabic upon the lexicon of a language which is quite distant from it in geographical, genetic and typological terms: Bamanankan (better known through the heteronym “Bambara”), one of the most widespread and rapidly expanding ‘indigenous’ African languages. In the first section, some historical details are provided about the context and specificities of the contact between these two languages. Subsequently, an array of different morphological and semantic features of borrowings and calques are analyzed, ranging from instances of integration and structural interference through inflection, derivation and compounding to instances of borrowing of an unanalyzed unit. A final section considers some examples of grammatical and semantic shift of loanwords, semantic and phraseological calques, and periphrastic re-translations.