A Descriptive Study of Igbo Loanwords from English in Contemporary Igbo Speech in Onitsha Markets

This study undertakes a descriptive analysis of English loanwords integrated into contemporary Igbo speech as observed in the marketplace discourse of Onitsha Main Market, Anambra State, South East Nigeria. Onitsha, historically one of West Africa's largest markets, is a vibrant contact zone where traders from diverse linguistic backgrounds negotiate in a mixture of Igbo, Nigerian Pidgin English, and English, generating productive conditions for lexical borrowing. The study collects its primary data through systematic ethnographic observation and recording of natural market conversations over a period of eight weeks, yielding a corpus of approximately four hundred and fifty identified loanwords. Phonological adaptation, morphological integration, and semantic shift processes affecting borrowed items are analysed within a contact linguistics framework. Findings show that the majority of loanwords originate from commercial, technology, and transportation semantic domains, reflecting the practical drivers of lexical borrowing. Phonological adaptation follows regular patterns, with English consonant clusters simplified and English vowels approximated to Igbo vowel inventory. Approximately thirty-one percent of analysed loanwords have undergone semantic narrowing in Igbo usage. The study contributes empirical data to Igbo contact linguistics and informs debates on lexical modernisation versus lexical purism in language planning. Keywords: loanwords, Igbo, English, contact linguistics, Onitsha market.