Abstract:
This study investigates the impacts of language contact between Hausa and English among bilinguals in the contemporary Hausa social network. Although language contact situations in Nigeria coexist with many other indigenous languages, this study provides the context for examining language interaction between Hausa and the English language. That is, the reciprocal influences which the two languages have on each other as promoted by the social network. The paper adopts Labov’s theory of Sociolinguistic Variation (1972) and Phillipson's theory of Linguistic Imperialism (1992) as the framework of analysis. The analysis identifies key contact phenomena, including lexical borrowing, code-switching, code-mixing, and relexification. It also illustrates their manifestation in specific lexical and syntactic features drawn from social network interactions. The results showed that some of the dimensions of language interaction included borrowing, code-switching and code-mixing, relexification, and shifting, among others. It also found that there were some lexicons and some syntactic characteristics of the utterances that were purposely exchanged between Hausa–English bilingual speakers in the social network. The study concludes that these contact strategies serve as communicative tools for bilinguals but may also signal underlying shifts in language prestige and use.
Keywords: Bilingualism, Language, Language Contact, Social Network
DOI: www.doi.org/10.36349/tjllc.2026.v05i02.009
author/Abubakar Usman Abubakar & Abdulrahman Shu’aibu
journal/Tasambo JLLC 5(2) | February 2026 |
