Semantic Analysis of «False- Friends»: A Case Study of English and Siin Seereer

Abstract

: The article is devoted to the semantic analysis of words called “False-Friends” in English and Siin Seereer. “False-Friends” are words belonging to two different languages and which have a great similarity in form between them or are written in the same, but whose meanings are different. In other words, a word is considered “False-Friend” when it is close in its writing or pronunciation to a term of another language but whose meaning is different. Thus, the study focuses on some words that belong both to English and Siin Seereer languages and whose meanings are different. English and Seereer are two different languages which do not belong to the same language family. English belongs to the Indo European language family, whereas Seereer is part of the West Atlantic branch of the Niger-Congo family. However, there are several identical words (in terms of writing) in these two languages and whose meanings may cause lots of difficulties to Seereer native speakers who learn English and to English native speakers who learn Seereer language. Furthermore, the study and/or analysis of these “False-Friends” arouse several questions some of which: Why do these two languages share these common words? Do these words have certain meanings in common? Do they belong to the same grammatical categories? Are they structured in the same way in both languages? Do these “False-Friends” have the same pronunciation in English and Seereer? What are their linguistic similarities and differences? To find answers to these questions, we will strive to explore the writings of some Seereer students. Field surveys as well as interviews of native speakers will also be organized and analyzed in this study. In addition, we will read documents (books, articles, novels, stories, etc.) written in English and in Siin Seereer. This research will help us have a lot of information and collect data for the corpus. After the elaboration of the corpus, we will move on to data analysis and we will end up with results that we are going to present during the discussions