Islamic Finance Arabic Terminology in Nigerian Regulatory Documents: A Corpus-Based Study

The regulatory architecture for Islamic banking and finance in Nigeria, administered by the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Securities and Exchange Commission, employs a growing body of Arabic-derived technical terminology whose standardisation, consistency, and accessibility present challenges for both practitioners and regulators. This study conducts a corpus-based analysis of Islamic finance Arabic terminology in Nigerian financial regulatory documents, examining the consistency of terminology use, the accuracy of Arabic term transliteration into English, and the adequacy of definitional glosses provided in the documents. A specialised corpus of 200 regulatory documents including CBN guidelines, SEC frameworks, Islamic finance product approval circulars, and Sharia advisory committee reports, totalling approximately 500,000 words, is compiled for the period 2018 to 2024. Corpus analysis tools are used to identify all Arabic-derived terms, their frequency distributions, collocational patterns, and contextual definitions. Cross-document comparison assesses terminological consistency, and expert review by five Arabic linguistics and Islamic finance specialists evaluates translation and definitional accuracy. The study finds significant inconsistency in the transliteration of key terms such as musharaka, mudaraba, and ijara across regulatory bodies, and identifies 23 terms for which definitional glosses are misleading or absent. The study proposes a standardised Nigerian Islamic Finance Arabic Terminology Glossary. Keywords: Islamic finance terminology, corpus linguistics, regulatory documents, Arabic terminology, Nigeria.