Abstract: Songs are deliberately composed verbal arts. Hence, singers also wishfully incorporate certain linguistic and literary devices in their songs to achieve the desired literary effects. Against this background, this paper explores four of Kassu Zurmi’s songs labeled as waƙoƙin ɓarayi ‘the songs of thieves’ in Hausa Literary Studies, focusing on instances of assimilation in the songs. Using Magaji’s (2016) oral-to-text transcription of the particular songs, and guided by the theoretical view that assimilatory processes constitute some of the major features of the western dialects of Hausa, and can occur across morpheme/word boundaries and within words (Bello, 2015), the paper reaffirms the several occurrences of assimilation across the four songs. The paper argues that the great many instances of assimilation traversing nearly all the verses of each of the songs have both linguistic and literary significance. Linguistically, they do not only determine the singer’s dialectal affiliation but also indicate that West Hausa is the dialectal context in which the songs have been composed, as it is only in the verbal renditions of the western dialects of Hausa that one finds assimilation occurring severally and spontaneously. Literarily, they accentuate the songs’ artistic qualities, as their huge occurrences make the songs artistically spicier and rhythmically/melodically coherent and vibrant.
Keywords: Assimilation, Kassu Zurmi, Waƙoƙin Ɓarayi [The Songs of Thieves] Linguistic and Literary
Significance
DOI: www.doi.org/10.36349/tjllc.2025.v04i01.007
author/Dr. Ibrahim Ahmed
journal/Tasambo JLLC 4(1) | May 2025 |
