Morphosyntactic Features of Nigerian Arabic: A Descriptive Grammar of Hausa-Arabic Contact Variety in Kano

The sustained contact between Arabic and Hausa in the Kano urban context over centuries has produced a distinctive Arabic contact variety used among traders, scholars, and educated Muslims that blends Arabic morphosyntactic structures with Hausa phonological and lexical features, and which has not previously been subjected to systematic descriptive grammatical analysis. This study provides a descriptive grammar of the morphosyntactic features of Nigerian Arabic as used in the Kano contact community, with the aim of filling a significant gap in the linguistic documentation of West African Arabic varieties. Using a language documentation methodology informed by corpus linguistics and descriptive grammar theory, the research compiles an original corpus of approximately 80,000 words of natural speech data from 60 speakers recorded in spontaneous conversation, formal discussion, and narrative elicitation contexts. Morphosyntactic features including verb conjugation, nominal inflection, agreement patterns, syntactic complementation, and negation strategies are described and compared with Modern Standard Arabic and Classical Arabic norms. The study finds systematic grammatical simplification in case marking and verbal morphology, alongside innovative hybrid constructions particularly in noun phrase internal agreement. The descriptive grammar produced serves as a linguistic resource for typologists, contact linguists, and Arabic educators working in the Kano context. Keywords: Nigerian Arabic, contact variety, descriptive grammar, Hausa-Arabic contact, morphosyntax.