Perso-Arabic Loanwords in Hindustani. Part II. Linguistic Study

This book constitutes the second part of the two-volume monograph edicated to the phenomenon of Perso-Arabic lexical borrowings in Hindustani (by some scholars also named Hindi-Urdu or Hirdu). It is a linguistic study of their adaptation, meant to demonstrate how the analyzed loanwords function in the contemporary system of the Hindustani language, through detailed examination of the adaptation processes, which occured on all the levels of this system: graphemic, phonetic and phonological, morphological, lexical and semantic. The first part, published in 2008, is a substantial dictionary of borrowings (Perso-Arabic Loanwords in Hindustani. Part I. Dictionary), encompassing over 5500 entries, which over the centuries (starting approximately from the 11th-12th c.), entered into the languages and dialects of North India* as a result of the contacts between local communities and Muslim incomers. The lexical material gathered in the Dictionary was taken as the corpus for this study.