The Influence of Multilingual Environment on Igbo Lexical Innovation: Evidence from Igbo Communities in Bauchi State, North East Nigeria

This study examines the influence of Bauchi State's multilingual environment on Igbo lexical innovation among Igbo-speaking communities resident in Bauchi and Misau local government areas, North East Nigeria. Contact-induced lexical change in African minority communities has been studied in southern Nigerian contexts but remains virtually undocumented for Igbo communities in the North East, where extreme multilingual pressure from Hausa, Fulfulde, and several indigenous Chadic languages creates a distinctive contact ecology. The research collects natural speech data from forty-two Igbo adult speakers in Bauchi over a six-month period through conversation recordings, word elicitation tasks, and narrative production sessions. Lexical innovation strategies identified include Hausa loanword integration, hybrid Igbo-Hausa compound formation, semantic extension of existing Igbo words to cover new referential domains, and calque formation based on Hausa lexical models. Acoustic analysis supplements lexical analysis to document phonological adaptation patterns in borrowed items. Findings reveal that Hausa exerts a disproportionate influence on Igbo lexical innovation in Bauchi relative to English or other contact languages, contrary to patterns observed in southern diaspora communities where English influence is dominant. The study proposes a contact ecology model for understanding contact-induced lexical change in extreme minority language contexts. Keywords: Igbo lexical innovation, multilingualism, Bauchi State, contact linguistics, language change.