Theorising German-Hausa Contact Linguistics: New Directions for Language Policy in Northern Nigeria

This study develops an original theoretical framework for German-Hausa contact linguistics, drawing on empirical data from language contact phenomena documented among German language learners and users in Kano, Sokoto, and Kaduna states, North West Nigeria. Contact linguistics has generated rich theoretical frameworks for understanding linguistic interaction between languages that share speakers or social functions, but German and Hausa have rarely been examined as contact languages despite the growing presence of German in northern Nigerian educational, commercial, and diplomatic contexts. The study combines historical-sociolinguistic analysis of the German language presence in northern Nigeria since the colonial period with synchronic corpus analysis of spoken and written data collected from 60 German-Hausa bilingual informants across three years. The data are analysed for evidence of code-switching, morphosyntactic convergence, lexical borrowing, phonological accommodation, and emergent mixed codes. A theoretical model of German-Hausa contact dynamics is developed, specifying the social conditions, structural prerequisites, and directionality patterns of contact-induced change in this understudied language pair. The study further develops language policy recommendations for the management of German-Hausa bilingualism in educational, commercial, and media settings in northern Nigeria. Keywords: contact linguistics, German, Hausa, northern Nigeria, language policy.