International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) |Volume IV, Issue IX, September 2020|ISSN 2454-6186 www.rsisinternational.org Page 465 Grammatical Gender Marking of English Loanwords in Ng‟aturukana Celestine Nkieny Tioko, Henry Simiyu Nandelenga, Joshua Mulinge Itumo Department of Literature, Linguistics and Foreign Languages, Kenyatta University, Nairobi-Kenya Abstract: Borrowing of words is one of the inevitable outcomes of the multilingual and multicultural societies across the globe. This paper sought to answer two questions. First, what grammatical genders do English words acquire when borrowed into Ng’aturukana? Second, what arguments exist in Ng’aturukana that model the assignment of specific grammatical genders to the borrowed words? Data were drawn from local radio stations discussions broadcasting in Ng’aturukana and from native speaker’s intuition. Another competent native speaker verified and validated the data. The grammatical gender assigned and the explanations guiding in the assignment were noted and explained. From the analyses, the paper reports that nominal loans were assigned either the masculine or the feminine gender when borrowed into Ng’aturukana. It also established that the Turkana native knowledge of concepts, uses of the referred objects, specific gender (people) associated with the objects and the general activities under which the referred objects are used determined the specific gender assigned to a loan term. The paper is expected to contribute to the existing discourse on the borrowing of words phenomenon and may act as a basis through which other gender marking languages can be investigated and compared. Key words: Borrowing, Loanwords, Grammatical gender, Ng’aturukana, English I. INTRODUCTION. his paper investigated the grammatical gender assignment of the English loanwords borrowed into Ng‟aturukana. Grammatical gender has been argued to be one of the most stable features of languages (Corbet 1991; Di Garbo, 2014). Loanword borrowing has become common in many languages due to the high rate of multilingualism and multiculturalism embraced across the globe. Ng‟aturukana is a gender sensitive language in its noun, preposition and pronoun groups (Dimmendaal, 1983). Prior researches conducted on Ng‟aturukana have noted the complex nature of Ng‟aturukana, especially on grammatical gender marking. A more interesting scenario occurs when it borrows words from the other languages. English nouns occur as neuter. Ng‟aturukana, on the other hand, assigns the masculine and feminine genders prefixationally. Neuter gender is associated with the diminutive cases in Ng‟aturukana. Syncretism is also observed to exist in Ng‟aturukana prefixes which mark gender because they also carry number, cohesion/agreement and case features information. This behaviour is illuminated in the nominal case often perceived as the absolute case with a clear gender marking structure and the locative case. This study, however, ignored these other information and only focused on the grammatical gender. The „what‟ and „why‟ Ng‟aturukana designates grammatical gender to each of the loan nouns borrowed are what this paper sought to identify. The paper first introduces the concept of grammatical gender and semantic gender systems from both a universal and Ng‟aturukana specific perspectives. The next part discusses the concept of borrowing and the motivations behind borrowing in Ng‟aturukana. Grammatical Gender Grammatical gender is a complex phenomenon that is marked in the nouns. By definition, grammatical gender is a system that defines a class of nouns in relation to the other word classes co-occurring with it in syntactical environments (Corbet, 2013; Di Garbo 2014; Corbet & Fedden, 2016). In the overt cases, grammatical gender may refer to the characteristics of a noun in terms of its natural sex inferences and/or references. Focusing on this definition, it is apparent that gender can be marked by not only focusing on a word in isolation but largely on the other words in its neighbourhood. Words such as numerals, articles, adjectives and pronouns may portray gender class agreement features in different languages of the world. English portrays gender marking in the third person pronouns and a small number of nouns that indicate the gender of the person involved in an activity, for instance, waiter-waitress, actor-actress, host- hostess among others (Comrie, 1999). Ng‟aturukana has a tripartite gender marking system in that its non-derived nouns can be classified as feminine, masculine, or neuter. These genders are marked using the prefixes; outlined in the table below. The data in the table shows two cases, nominal and locative. This paper dwelt on the nominative because it is the one that is natural to nouns per se. Table I: Grammatical Gender Prefixes in Ng‟aturukana Gender markers in the nouns A Nominal gender markers (-restrictive) B Locative gender markers (+restrictive) Gender Singular Plural Singular Plural Fem a- ŋa- nà - na- Masc e-/ɛ- ŋɪ- lò - lu- Neuter i-/-ɪ- ŋɪ- nì - lu- Adopted from (Dimmendaal, 2000; Grimm, 2012) T