Sociolinguistic Dimensions of Hausa-Fulfulde Contact: Bilingualism, Convergence, and Identity in the Lake Chad Basin

The Lake Chad Basin represents one of West Africa's most complex multilingual environments, where Hausa and Fulfulde have been in intensive contact for several centuries, producing extensive bilingualism, lexical borrowing, structural convergence, and complex patterns of language choice that intersect with ethnic, religious, and pastoral-sedentary identity boundaries. This doctoral study develops an original theoretical and empirical account of Hausa-Fulfulde language contact in the Lake Chad Basin, examining bilingualism types, convergence processes, and the identity dimensions of language choice across communities in Borno, Yobe, and Adamawa states of Nigeria, and comparative data from Niger and Cameroon. A five-year multi-site sociolinguistic ecology research design was employed, combining extensive community surveys in 18 communities across the three states, in-depth interviews with 120 bilingual community members, corpus-based analysis of contact phenomena in speech recordings, and structural analysis of convergence patterns across a range of grammatical features. The comparative component examines how national context shapes different Hausa-Fulfulde contact dynamics across international borders. Original theoretical contributions include a Lake Chad Basin Hausa-Fulfulde Contact Ecology Theory that integrates ethnicity, religion, pastoral-sedentary lifeworld, and national political context as determining factors in language contact outcomes. Empirical contributions include the first systematic comparative documentation of structural convergence between Hausa and Fulfulde across multiple communities, with significant implications for contact linguistics theory. Keywords: Hausa, Fulfulde, Language contact, Lake Chad Basin, Bilingualism.