Abstract
The paper attempts to identify and study those linguistic
items borrowed from Hausa to Kanuri language with special attentions to the
deglottalization and sonorization processes employed in incorporating the loanwords.
Borrowing is a phenomenon which is as old as human social, economic, and
administrative contact. When a contact is established between two or more
different linguistic communities, there is the tendency for linguistic
borrowing to take place. Therefore, despite the fact that Hausa belongs to Chadic
family and Kanuri belongs to Nilo-Sahara, there exists linguistic borrowing
between them. The paper focuses on the deglottalization and sonorization in
nativazation of the borrowed words. The
research sought data from two sources. These sources are primary and secondary.
The primary source includes unobtrusive observation when discourse is taking
place in Kanuri language. Similarly, the researcher’s intuition plays
significant role in identifying the loanwords being a native speaker of the
language. On the other hand, the secondary sources include written records,
such as journal articles, dissertations, thesis, dictionaries etc. The paper concludes that Kanuri, a
Nilo-Saharan language uses deglottalization and sonorization in nativazation of
some Hausa borrowed lexical items. This resulted in making the loanwords to
behave like the native words of the target language (Kanuri).
Keywords: Loanwords, Nativization, Deglottalization, Consonant and Sonorization
DOI: www.doi.org/10.36349/tjllc.2024.v03i01.006
author/Musa Grema
journal/Tasambo JLLC | 15 February 2024 | Article 06
