Analysing the Morphosyntactic Features of Hausa as Spoken in Bauchi State: Regional Variation and Standard Comparison

Regional varieties of Hausa exhibit morphosyntactic features that diverge in systematic ways from the Kano-based standard variety codified in grammars and educational materials, yet comparative morphosyntactic documentation of regional varieties remains incomplete in the existing literature. This study analyses the morphosyntactic features of Hausa as spoken in Bauchi State, documenting systematic divergences from standard Hausa and examining the social evaluation of these features by speakers. A variationist sociolinguistic design was employed, drawing on a corpus of spontaneous speech recordings from 80 Hausa speakers in Bauchi, Dass, and Tafawa Balewa local government areas. Targeted elicitation tasks supplemented natural speech data for specific morphosyntactic variables. Grammaticality judgment tasks administered to 40 Bauchi speakers and 40 standard Hausa speakers assessed mutual intelligibility and feature recognition. Analysis focused on noun class gender marking, object pronoun clitic placement, aspect marking variation, and prepositional phrase structure. Findings document consistent and systematic morphosyntactic patterns in Bauchi Hausa that differ from standard forms in several domains, including preferred pronoun clitic positions and aspect marker distribution in compound verb constructions. These features show high within-variety consistency but are frequently stigmatised in educational contexts where only standard Hausa is evaluated. The study contributes to the description of North East Hausa varieties and argues for greater accommodation of regional morphosyntactic variation in pedagogical frameworks. Keywords: Hausa morphosyntax, Regional variation, Bauchi State, Sociolinguistics, Dialect grammar.