12 Examining the Integration of Borrowed Nouns in Immigrant Speech: The Case of Canadian Greek

The chapter examines borrowing and integration of nouns in the language spoken by Greek immigrants in Canada, where English is the donor language and Greek the recipient. It deals with the questions whether the typological distance between the English and the Greek, where the former is analytic and the latter fusional is an inhibitor for borrowing and whether the types of integration can be attributed to specific properties of the languages in contact. It argues that phonological, morphological and semantic factors are at work throughout the process of adopting and integrating English nouns, but morphological constraints have the most prominent role. More specifically, it shows the mandatory alignment to the fundamental Greek properties of inflection and gender assignment, which caters for the accommodation of loan nouns in Canadian Greek by assigning them specific gender values, and an unequivocal preference for particular inflection classes, the ones most productively used in Greek. The data are drawn from both written and oral sources, the latter being recorded interviews with spontaneous Greek immigrant speech from the provinces of Québec, Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia.