ABSTRACT
This research work discusses the sociolinguistic phenomenon of

borrowing among languages whenever they come into contact. It

provides an insight into the notion of language borrowing and how it

affects the vocabulary build-up of a given language. This research

investigates the roots of some English words of Arabic origin and how

they made their way into the stock of the English vocabulary. The study

elaborates the meaning of language borrowing, its implications, reasons,

the role it plays in vocabulary build-up, etc. It also discusses the nature

of the relationship between the English language and Arabic and how

they came into contact. The research work is archival. The researcher

explains how he went about collecting the data that would be sampled,

presented and analyzed later, and the techniques applied in the data

collection and analysis. The research presents the data collected and

analyzes it by putting the data in tables. This tabulation categorizes the

meanings, routes, the nature of borrowing, and the approximate time of

the appearance of some of these loanwords in the English vocabulary.

The raw data of this research comprises a list of Arabic loanwords in the

English language. The findings of the investigation show how the English

and Arabic languages came into contact, and how Arabic words

influenced the English vocabulary, and it also indicates the major fields

of specialization from which most of the borrowed words originated. It

also examines the levels to which most of these loanwords got assimilated

into the borrowing language. It is generally an etymological analysis of

some Arabic originated words that became part of the English

vocabulary today