IBIBIO LOAN-WORDS IN ENGLISH LEXICON: HISTORICAL ORIGIN AND COMPARATIVE LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS (1)

There are words which are of Ibibio origin found in contemporary English lexicon. These words are probably loan-words or derivatives from Ibibio vocabulary. Thus, the crux of this paper is to ascertain their roots and trace their probable routes to the English lexicon, and also embark on a comparative analysis between them and the Ibibio equivalents. To ascertain the Ibibioness or not of the words, the paper will compare and contrasts them and also examine their phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic and etymological meanings in a bid to commenting on the nexus and open a floodgate for further researches. Historical analytical methodology has been adopted for this study. The findings and conclusion have shown that the English language borrows from the Ibibio language in the last 600 years.