Lexical Borrowing from Hausa in Contemporary Northern Nigerian English: A Sociolinguistic Analysis

Lexical borrowing from Nigerian indigenous languages into English is a well-documented feature of Nigerian English development, and the specific patterns of Hausa lexical integration into the English of northern Nigerian speakers constitute an important dimension of the regional sociolinguistic identity of this variety. This study analyses lexical borrowing from Hausa into the contemporary English of educated northern Nigerian speakers, focusing on phonological adaptation, semantic modification, and sociolinguistic distribution of Hausa loanwords in English discourse. A corpus of spoken and written English produced by two hundred educated northern Nigerian speakers in Kano, Sokoto, and Niger states was assembled, combining recorded speech samples from semi-structured interviews, social media text samples, and formal writing samples from university essay collections. The corpus was processed for Hausa-origin lexical items using an identification protocol drawing on published Hausa lexicographic resources, yielding a loanword inventory of two hundred and thirty-eight items. Phonological adaptation analysis shows a dominant pattern of vowel substitution adjusting Hausa tone-language contrasts to English stress-based phonology. Semantic analysis reveals that approximately forty-two percent of identified loanwords show semantic narrowing upon integration, often retaining only a culturally specific sense that English lacks a precise equivalent for. Sociolinguistic distribution analysis demonstrates that Hausa loanwords are significantly more frequent in informal speech than formal writing and more frequent in male than female speaker samples. The study contributes to the descriptive lexicology of northern Nigerian English. Keywords: lexical borrowing, Hausa, northern Nigerian English, sociolinguistics, loanwords.