A Sociohistorical Linguistics of Arabic in Nigeria: Tracing the Evolution of Nigerian Arabic Varieties from the Pre-Colonial Period to the Present

The Arabic language has been present in the territory that is now Nigeria for over a millennium, yet no comprehensive sociohistorical linguistic account of the evolution of Arabic varieties, registers, and functions across this period exists, leaving a fundamental gap in both the history of Arabic as a global language and the linguistic history of Nigeria. This study provides a sociohistorical linguistic account of Arabic in Nigeria from the pre-colonial period to the present, tracing the evolution of Arabic varieties, the transformation of Arabic's social functions, and the interaction between Arabic and Nigerian languages across successive historical periods. Drawing on a combination of historical documentary analysis, comparative linguistic reconstruction, corpus analysis of diachronic text collections, and sociolinguistic fieldwork with contemporary communities, the research integrates evidence from Arabic manuscripts, colonial linguistic surveys, missionary language documentation, postcolonial census data, and contemporary speech communities. Historical sociolinguistics, language contact theory, and comparative Afroasiatic linguistics provide the theoretical framework. The study identifies four major historical periods in the sociolinguistics of Arabic in Nigeria: pre-jihad scholarly introduction, Sokoto Caliphate consolidation, colonial disruption and transformation, and postcolonial diversification, each characterised by distinctive patterns of language contact, variety formation, and function change. An original Nigerian Arabic Sociohistorical Linguistics Model is proposed. Keywords: Sociohistorical linguistics, Arabic Nigeria, language history, language contact, diachronic analysis.