Borrowing as an Achilles Heel to the Vocabulary Development and Extinction of Yoruba Words: A Socio-Semantic Approach

The scope of this paper is to examine the impact of lexical borrowing on Yorùbá vocabulary development. The paper is a follow up on the existing literatures on borrowing and classification of borrowing in Yorùbá language. The main aim of this paper is to examine the negative impact borrowing has on Yorùbá language development which has not been fully studied by previous scholars and how this negative trend can be stopped or reduced to the barest minimum. This research work adopts a qualitative approach to data gathering and elicitation. Data for this research work were gathered from both primary and secondary sources through careful observation of native speakers of the language and also through consultation of existing literatures that are related to this work. Our findings revealed that borrowing of words which are already available in the language has led to the endangerment, extinction and death of many native Yorùbá words and put others on the verge of going into extinction because of restriction placed on their usage by speakers of the language and the preference most of the speakers have for borrowed words. Also, it was observed that borrowing in Yoruba language can be classified into Mutualism and Parasitism borrowing. We conclude that creation of new words through research workshops by linguists, works such as Bamgbose (1984) and Awobuluyi (1990) on Yorùbá meta-language is one of the ways this can be curtail. Also, intralingua borrowing and trans-disciplinary borrowing should be encouraged while unnecessary external borrowing especially when there is no linguistics need to do so should be discouraged.