Genericization of Foreign Brand Names in Iraqi Arabic: A Linguistic Study

The study aims at investigating the exceptional use of companies and products‟ names to refer to things that are new or unfamiliar. This usually happens when people from different cultures, countries or cities come into contact with each other in different social situations. This contact leads people of one culture to exchange words, concepts and even products with various other cultures and nations for different purposes. This linguistic exchange is known as „borrowing‟ and the words being borrowed are „loanwords‟. Brand loanwords are regarded as a special case of interest as they are used colloquially and/or formally by people in Iraq and they vary enormously from scientific words to social words, from nouns to verbs, words used especially by the older generation and those used only by the young one, words used by the upper class and those used by the lower class, etc. However, any of such words could be a brand name that stands for a company or a product. This manuscript is divided into four sections: introduction, method, results and discussion.