Examining the Convergence of Hausa and Kanuri in Borno State: A Contact Linguistics Analysis

The long-standing coexistence of Hausa and Kanuri in Borno State, historically one of West Africa's most significant precolonial Muslim kingdoms, has produced sustained linguistic contact that has influenced both languages through borrowing, structural convergence, and the development of mixed speech styles among bilingual speakers. This study examines the convergence of Hausa and Kanuri in Borno State through contact linguistics analysis, documenting lexical borrowing, phonological influence, and morphosyntactic convergence phenomena. A contact linguistics research design was employed, drawing on speech data from 60 Kanuri-Hausa bilingual speakers in Maiduguri and three rural Borno communities, collected through recorded conversational sessions and targeted elicitation tasks. Lexical comparison of Kanuri-Hausa bilinguals' speech with monolingual Hausa and Kanuri norms identified convergence patterns. Structural analysis examined order-of-element convergence in verb phrases and noun modifier positions. Findings document substantial lexical borrowing from Kanuri into Hausa in domains of fishing, political administration, and traditional dress vocabulary in Borno Hausa, and reverse borrowing from Hausa into Kanuri in commercial and Islamic religious domains. Morphosyntactic convergence is less pronounced but observable in some bilingual speakers' verb phrase constructions. The study contributes to the documentation of Hausa contact phenomena in the Lake Chad basin contact zone and addresses a research gap in the comparative study of Hausa contact with Nilo-Saharan languages. Keywords: Hausa, Kanuri, Language contact, Convergence, Borno State.