ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the extent to which two factors mentioned by White—migrant labour and British administration—and two others not mentioned by him—Christianity and education—have affected the development of one of the major languages of Zambia—Bemba. It demonstrates that the migration of people from the rural to the urban area, and vice versa, has had a sort of 'double-edged' diffusional effect on the language in that, to a considerable extent, word borrowing in Bemba has not been uni-directional. The main group of loanwords in Bemba appear to be the result, predominantly of Arab-Bemba, and, on the other, predominantly of European-Bemba, contact. While attributing most Swahili loan-words in Bemba to Bemba-Arab contact, it must be remembered that not all such loan-words were due to this contact. There are other loan-words in Bemba of Swahili origin which, in the absence of factual evidence to the contrary, one could attribute directly to Bemba-Arab contact.
