Linguistics Terminology and Neologisms in Swahili: Rules vs. Practice

In this article we discuss the use of Swahili terminology in the field of linguistics. In particular, we are interested in finding out whether the rules laid out by scholars in the scientific literature for the creation of terminological neologisms in Swahili correspond with actual practice. In order to do this, three steps are taken. In Step 1 we undertake the semi-automatic extraction of linguistics terminology, by comparing occurrence frequencies in a special-purpose corpus consisting of ten recent Swahili language/linguistics textbooks, with their corresponding frequencies in a twenty-two-million-token general-language reference corpus of Swahili. In Step 2 we study the source languages and actual word formation processes of the terms and neologisms with the highest keyness values obtained during the previous step. This discussion is divided into several sections, one section per source language. In Step 3, the terms and neologisms that have been found are compared with their treatment (or absence thereof) in two existing reference works, a general dictionary and a linguistics terminology list. These three steps are preceded by brief introductions to (i) the Swahili language; (ii) its dictionaries and terminology lists; (iii) its metalexicographical, terminological and neologism studies; and (iv) our use of the term "neologism." The three steps are followed by a discussion of our findings and a conclusion.