Language, Migration and National Identity in Nigeria

Abdalla Uba Adamu

Department of Information and Media Studies
Faculty of Communication
Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria

Abstract
Drawing from evidence in sociolinguistics and what Victor Turner (1986) refers to as ‘the anthropology of
experience’, this paper analyzes immigration from the perspective of loanwords into various languages.
The specific site of contestation is the Hausa language of northern Nigeria. Drawing from the Hausa
classical dictionary of Bargery (1934), as well as personal ‘anthropology of experience’ (Turner, 1986), I
analyze the shifting patterns of idiolect, sociolect and onomatopoeic migration of Hausa words into
linguistic Nigerianism. To provide a wider transnational canvas, I first look at the infusion of loanwords
from various language clusters into the English language, the third most spoken language in the world,
although the most widely spread. The main premise of the paper is that language is an ‘intangible’ migrant,
often being domesticated in social cultures that radically differ from it, whether regionally, nationally or
globally. This contrasts with the notion of human migration, whether temporary or permanent. Language
migration is a permanent displacement of words and expressions that over time, contribute towards
construction of new identities. The source of the data is the classical Hausa dictionary of Bargery (1934)
and our personal ‘anthropology of experience’ as embedded language users in Nigeria.

Keywords: Hausa, Nigeria, migration, loanwords

Introduction
Studies on migration have traditionally focused on the movement of people, whether
temporarily, although predominantly permanently, from one location to a totally different
location, whether in the same country or across borders. According to Kleiner (2003, p.10-11),

…the term migration refers to the act or process by which people, especially as a group
move from one location (city, country, region) to another. The term migrant has no legal
status. Thus, many nations now use the terms immigrant or emigrant. These terms have
legal status, and they are carefully defined in various national and international legal
codes. Immigration typically refers to the process of people leaving one nation for
permanent residence in another. Emigration typically refers to the process of people
leaving a nation (including emphasis)

It is instructive to note that ‘immigration’ here refers to a permanent process, not temporary. As
Waldinger (2015, p.1) further noted, ‘immigrants are the people who leave one country behind to
settle down somewhere else.’ This, of course, creates a problem of internal migrants – who
merely relocate, for whatever reason, from one section of their country to another.

Cross-border migration of the human race has been an on-going process since the initial
formation of human communities and dispersal of the species. These are all tangible migrations.
What is not tangible is language migration – a process in which words, expressions, and phrases
leave their native spaces and acquire same or new permanent meanings in another locality. As
“migrant” itself language often travels with migrants where they established roots and either lose
it or acquire the language of their surroundings. This was more so for temporary migrants (e.g.
students from a different country who must study a foreign language in a university before
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completing their studies). As language travels from one community to another where words,
expressions are domesticated to the local language situations and gain universal acceptance as
“home-grown” even though the language expressions were either borrowed from migrant
settlers, or acquired during the period of temporary migration and contact through travels and
trade.

This paper looks at what I refer to as the ‘intangible migration’ of language with emphasis of
linguistic borrowing through the adoption of loanwords by both in-groups (residents) and out-
groups (settlers). The base site of our contestation of language as a migrant is the Hausa
language of northern Nigeria and whose lands form a crucible of settlement by migrants for
centuries, attracting both transborder migrants (predominantly Arabs of North African origin) as
well as in-country migrants from predominantly non-Muslim communities of southern Nigeria.
Forming ‘internal diasporic settlements’ among the Hausa, there has not been evidence of any
substantive ‘integration’ between the Hausa and these migrant settlers – each preferring to
maintain its cultural spaces and identity. Language, however, rejects these barriers and moves
across what I refer to as ‘diasporic borders’ and settle in and out of the groups.

To provide a wider perspective of im/migration of language, I also look at how Hausa immigrant
words acquired a ‘national’ outlook as Nigerianisms, moving from idiolects – speech or words
peculiar to a person, i.e. the dialect of an individual, which can transit to a commonly adopted
expression, thus becoming part of lexical corpus of the individual’s in-group – to sociolect which
are different ways of using the same expression but in different cultures, or out-groups. I use
sociolect alternatively with Nigerianism, where a Hausa in-group idiolect transits ‘out-group’
Nigerian cultural setting and became adopted as a migrant word being peculiar to Nigeria.

At the same time, I also argue that even the predominant ‘Nigerian official language’ of English
itself was formed significantly out of intangible migration of loan words from various cultures by
the English trade, contact and conquest.

For the Hausa, however, intangible migrant words came mainly into their lexical corpus though
their acquisition of Islamic religion, temporary migration to other parts of Nigeria, West Africa,
or as a result of mingling with permanent settlers who refused to give up their linguistic identity,
and the Hausa “migrated” their language and domesticated it. In this study therefore, the question
was how Hausa language evolved and devolved cultures and societies in a single invisible, but
clearly vocal, intangible entity I refer to as the ‘intangible migrant’.

The were two sources of data for the paper. The first was the Dictionary of the Hausa Language
by Bargery (1934) which contained words and expressions that are uniquely Hausa and based on
Bargery’s fieldwork in northern Nigeria in early parts of the 19th century. This translates Hausa
words, complete with etymology and regionalism, into English. It was made available on the
Web at http://maguzawa.dyndns.ws/. The entries included A Hausa-English Dictionary (39,000
words) and English-Hausa Vocabulary (4,600 words). Although there were other Hausa to
English dictionaries (e.g. Abraham. 1962; Skinner, 1965; Newman & Newman, 1977; Newman,
1990; and Awde, 1996, and), the one by Rev. Bargery remained the ‘gold standard’ in terms of
quintessential capturing of words that are as close to the ‘non-modern’ Hausa as possible. In
2006, a first Hausa-to-Hausa dictionary was published by the Center for the Study of Nigerian

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Languages as Ƙamusun Hausa na Jami'ar Bayero (Bayero University Kano, 2006). This also
proved invaluable in mapping new, ‘modern’ Hausa words that were both of migrant origin, or
as a result of urban lexicon.

The second source of data was not s not based on any specified dictionary, but part of my
personal experience as L1 Hausa speaker, a methodology that Turner & Turner (1982) refer to as
‘the anthropology of experience’. This methodology gives an embedded ethnographer the
methodological legitimacy to expertly provide observations, perspectives, notions and nuances of
language, dress, behavior codes, food habits and other forms of social discourse as a ‘privileged
insider’ and therefore as a primary reference. My analytical focus will be on two languages and
how various loanwords – my ‘intangible immigrants’ – became adopted in the two languages as
a result of contact, trade or settlement. I will focus on English and Hausa languages. The data for
the English use of intangible migrants in various lexical expressions is commonly available from
many writers (e.g. Kuthe, 2007; Haspelmath, 2009; Durkin, 2014; Gonzáles, 2017 amongst
others).

The Intangible Tangibility of Languages of the World

I begin the exploration of the intangible migrant concept with the English language, spoken by
both native and non-native speakers of the language across the world. It is fatuous to attempt an
English language mapping, suffice to say it is the most widely spread language in the world,
even though it is only the third widely native spoken language, after Chinese and Portuguese. I
start with English due to its obtrusive presence in all communities, and proceed to show how the
language benefitted from the presence of ‘intangible migrants’ through language acquisition,
adoption and adaptation.

Perhaps due to the extensive travels of the British, especially through colonialism, slavery and
trade, the language had absorbed intangible migrant words from other languages and groups and
over the centuries, the words became to be see seen as authentic English words. Detailed
linguists such as Durkin (2014) indicate the high degree of lexical borrowing or what I refer as
intangible migration, of words from many languages, such as Scandinavian, Celtic, German, into
the English language, especially the English spoken in the Middle Ages. The migration of words
into English from Spanish, for instance, is illustrated by Algeo (2017, 13-14), who noted that:

…Spanish words that English borrowed not directly from Spanish, but through some
other language, are regarded not as Spanish loans, but rather as from the language of
direct or “immediate” borrowing. Thus, Spanish or Portuguese baranda, varanda
‘handrail, balcony’ was introduced into Hindi, Bengali, and other Indie languages, and
from the latter was borrowed into Anglo-Indian and thence into general English as
veranda. Despite its “ultimate” Iberian origin, as far as English is concerned, the word is
an Indie borrowing.

In this we see how intangible a word is when it traveled from the Iberian peninsula, to India and
back to Europe, and eventually became part of World expression in English; for even the Hausa
refer to it as ‘baranda’. However, even without having to revert back to sources of origin, many
words in the English language were Hindi (Pal 2016). These include:

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 English Word Hindi Origin Meaning
jungle jangar wild wasteland
dinghy dingiya small rowing boat
pajamas payajama leg clothing
juggernaut jagannath yatra giant carriage
thug thag thief/swindler
shampoo champo squeeze, knead or massage
lut loot plunder or steal
bangla bungalow one storey house

The Hindi word paanch means ‘five’ and refers to the number of fruits used to make the drink of
the same name (something like ‘five alive’ in Nigerian marketing). The drink and the word
transited into English as punch which is a type of drink, but the word is also used to mean to
‘hit’.

Suzanne Kemmer of Rice University, United States was able to compile a compendium of
intangible immigrant words that entered into the English language from other languages (2019).
The original list was compiled for her course, LING 216 and provides a vast array of such
immigrant loanwords. Some of them and their sources are indicated in Table 1. The table also
includes sources from Turkish (Demir, 2016) French and German (Sitzman, 2016), and Arabic
(Arabic, 2017).

Table 1. Intangible Immigrants into English lexicon

Spanish Dutch German Amerindian Italian French Turkish Arabic

armada booze noodle squash arsenal grenade beg academic
marijuana landscape lager canoe umbrella bigot doodle demography
alligator onslaught blitzkrieg cannibal motto clique horde diplomacy
armadillo coleslaw poodle tobacco studio sachet kaftan canary
mosquito stockfish bum hurricane ghetto ballet kiosk philosophy
ranch dollar kindergarten maize balcony saloon lackey doctorate
tornado split potato piano bayonet mammoth surrealism
guitar uproar chocolate torso chassis quiver physics
vigilante leak chili violin garage shawarma tuna
barricade smuggle cartoon cafe yogurt giraffe
bravado cruise entrepreneur cat
cannibal sketch genre drama
desperado cookie folklore
embargo curl mythology

These words were acquired, as noted earlier, through trade, contact, conquest and settlement in
the various areas where the British domesticated the various words as their own – raising the
question of whether they do not have such equivalents in their own language to begin with.
However, that is the nature of the immigrant – the far side sites of contestations bring a greater
stimulus than local ecosystems, for such contacts enrich not only the language, through enhanced
lexical properties, but also the experiences of its users.

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The causalities of lexical borrowing are identified as either need or prestige (Hock & Joseph,
1996). As they further explained, need is an internal cause, emerging out of a changing socio-
cultural environment. Prestige is an external cause, where languages of more powerful cultural
spheres become sources for loans in other languages. Powerful and intellectual languages such as
Greek, Latin, German, Russian and English are frequent loan-givers in history, although English
is also a frequent loan-taker. In any event, a designation for a new concept is always created
when a new ‘arrival’ is integrated into the community of speakers. This designation may alter the
original phonetics of the immigrant word, thus integrating it into the linguistic vocabulary of its
new community.

Idiolectic and Sociolect Intangible Immigrants

While I prefer to use the term ‘intangible migrant’ to refer to the central core of my thesis of an
immigrant without a border – traveling, gossamer-like in-and-out of various vocalisms and
meaning constructions – nevertheless sociolinguists will see my ‘intangible migrant’ more easily
recognizable as words and expressions that have been borrowed or loaned from one linguistically
different in-group to another and domesticated by the second group. Additionally, they could
refer to idiolectic words that were created by one group (even within an in-group, e.g. families)
and through travels and contact, become a standard referent for a particular concept.

It is instructive to note I distinguish between neologism – newly coined word or expression – and
an adopted immigrant word. ‘Google’, for instance, is a neologism used to refer to searching for
information on the Internet. ‘Teleseminar’ and ‘webinar’ are also neologisms that acquired
higher visibility and currency during the Coronavirus pandemic in 2020 which forced, mainly
learning activities, as well as some social interactions, to online media, rather than in-person
experiences. Webinar is simply a seminar held via Internet. This has been going on since the
days of Video Conferencing in the 1990s, but gained new hegemony in the face of total
lockdown of social interactivity imposed by need to keep physical distance among participants.

Idiolect, on the other hand, as I referred earlier is an in-group expression/word belonging to a

distinct group of users. A typical example is the Kano word ‘Tal’udu’, which on the surface,
sounds Arabic; but is not. I restricted it to Kano because that was where it was created and the
only place where it has any meaning. It refers to the junction in the heart of the city of Kano that
will lead to Bayero University Kano (Gwarzo Road). The road that bisected the city into two,
leading to the junction was built by a British construction company, Taylor Woodrow, with their
names plastered boldly on their plant and machinery which were parked at the junction. Locals,
unable to pronounce ‘Taylor Woodrow’ simply created a onomatopoeic ‘Tal’udu’ as name for
the junction – something which it carries up to now and became a referent even for visitors as a
compass point.

Indeed, the travels of the intangible migrant to a new home (and from there, yet again, to another
‘home’) constitute the corpus of agreed vocabularies due to the domestication of the intangible
migrant, before it moves to another group. The domestication itself moves through stages. The
first is what I call ‘primary’ stage which refers to the initial interface between ‘in-group and
‘target’ out-groups. The second, ‘secondary’ stage is when the intangible migrant leaves the in-
group, and becomes domesticated by a third group, and so on. Thus these travels qualify

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language as a migrant, with no fixed abode, leaving its original ‘base’, where it may or may not
be remembered, but losing its identity, although not its roots, in its ‘secondary’ settlement.

Adopted words make sense only if they are referents to something that does not exist in the
target out-group, which leads to domestication, but with the same meaning, albeit different
pronunciation or spelling from the primary in-group source. By ‘intangible migrant’, I also refer
to the movement of idiolects, constructed “as a set of abstract phonetic sentences, form-earnings
pairs consisting, in the case of a spoken rather than a written or signed idiolect, of a structured
phonetic sound sequence…and a meaning of this sequence (Sackmann 2009, p. 5).

A perfect example of this idiolect migrant is the Hausa word, Inyamiri. The Hausa of northern
Nigeria refer to the Igbo people as Inyamirai (pl. Inyamira, fem.) This community idiolect does
not translate as Igbo, as the Hausa term for Yoruba, which is Yarabawa. Inyamiri is a corrupted
form of Igbo expression, “nye m mmiri”, which means “give/bring me water”. The Hausa
idiolect for this became corrupted as Inyamiri, using a combination of idiolectic and
onomatopoeic devices to modify the word, mmiri (water) onomatopoeically as Inyamiri. The
idiolect then underwent semantic expansion and became plural ‘Inyamirai for the whole of
Igbos. It thus became intangible migrant with repeated use among the Hausa before it migrated
to other groups in the north of Nigeria who also refer to the Igbo as ‘Inyamirai’, thus becoming a
Hausa sociolect as a dialect of specific group, but semantically adopted as part of increasing
Nigerianisms, by which I mean linguistic adoptions that have become either regional or national.

This idiolect differs from a specific word that has a definitive meaning in its original ‘home’, but
migrated to another society where it became more or less a referent, to the people who use it. A
typical example is the Hausa word ‘aboki’ which means ‘friend’. In southern Nigeria (at least
across the Niger bridge), it is used often in a derogatory way to refer to any northerner,
regardless of whether they are Hausa or not. This is because of the predominant perception of
southern Nigerians that anyone north of the Niger bridge is Hausa because Hausa is a common
community language in the area, despite the massive variety of languages available in the area.
‘Aboki’ is used in the same way that ‘Nigger’ is used in the United States by White Americans to
refer to African American, even though, ironically, the African Americans themselves have
domesticated the idiolect as an in-group reference, as evidenced by the numerous use of the word
in the songs of African American, Latino and even White rappers in the US (for which, see, for
example, LaGrone, 2000; Armstrong, 2004; Harkness 2008).

As noted earlier ‘aboki’ in Hausa simply means ‘friend’, and Hausa migrants in southern Nigeria
who find it difficult to pronounce non-Hausa and non-Islamic names (even southern Nigerian
Muslim names, like ‘Muroino’, for Hausa ‘Imran’) simply referred to their hosts as ‘aboki na’
(my friend). The word became idiolectic among southern Nigerians to refer to northerners, or at
least the Hausa. The Hausa living in south that I have interacted with were amused by this, as
they do not feel offended at all by being called ‘aboki’. This is because this southern idiolectic
immigrant is honorific to its northern roots, since you refer to a person as a ‘friend’ when you
really trust them. To emphasize this point, the word was adopted by a Hausa rapper, Isma’il
Abdullahi from the semi-Hausa community of Agege in Lagos. He adopted the stage name of
‘BMERI Aboki’, thus indigenizing the idiolectic slur as a personal identity tag which gave him

6
high audial visibility both in the north and in the south (as Aboki). BMERI Aboki often sang in
Hausa, pidgin English and Yoruba.

Another Hausa intangible immigrant idiolect is ‘suya’. In its Hausa linguistic home it means
‘frying’ (as a verb), but it is commonly used to refer to roasted meat, a dish of the Hausa street
cafes. The actual name of the roasted meat product is ‘tsire’ – skewered cow meat on sticks
which is marinated in spices and roasted close to burning logs (a kebab). A similar roasted meat
meal is ‘balangu’ which is grilled meat, usually of lamb or goat (ƙaramar dabba; smaller
animal), although lamb meat is preferable due to its sweeter – and healthier – taste. Southern
Nigerian clients of the Hausa who buy these types of meats somehow created an idiolect, ‘suya’
to refer to any meat sold by the Hausa. Yet ‘suya’ refers to fried meat, especially during the Eid-
al-Huda (the Abrahamic festival) celebrated once a year by all Muslims including Hausa
Muslims, during which sacrifices with various religiously allowed animals were made, and the
meat fried and distributed to the needy, but most especially neighbors. But idiolectically,
southerners refer to fried meat as ‘nama’, which simply means ‘meat’ in a generic sense (raw,
cooked, fried, grilled, etc). Some Hausa entrepreneurs, knowing that the Hausa can easily
distinguish between ‘suya’,‘tsire’ and ‘nama’, seized the opportunity of marketing visibility to
advertise their companies as ‘suya’ spots in southern Nigeria. A famous example the Yahuza
Suya Spot franchise, as illustrated in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1. Deceptive, but effective marketing of ‘Suya’

It is instructive that Yahuza Suya Spot does not market fried meat, but roasted or grilled meat.
But they adopted the ‘Suya’ name to appeal to a general Nigerianism.

There are other words that belong to one group but become national in use, sharing, ironically
enough, the same meaning across different linguistic communities (thus further qualifying my
expression of ‘intangible migrant’). An example is ‘wahala’. This is a Hausa word meaning
‘trouble’, ‘suffering’, ‘bothersome’. It was derived from Arabic ‘wahla’ (terror or fright).
However, it has become Nigerianized as meaning ‘trouble’, often substituting as a similar word
in English, but used to emphasize its Nigerian idiolectic origin. For instance:

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 *NSE Please stop bothering me Pidgin Abeg, make u no give me wahala
I don’t want any suffering/trouble from her I no want any woman wahala
(a distinct biological female)
I am tired of his troublesomeness I don tire for em wahala sef
I find his demands too much I find em wahala too much

In each of these examples, of Nigerian Standard English (NSE) and Pidgin, the intangible
immigrant word retains it root meaning across the various linguistic expressions and sentence
constructions. Thus ‘wahala’ can be, tired, trouble, weary, fed-up etc – generally dissatisfaction.
A Hausa immigrant word has thus become a sociolect – as the dialect of a particular group of
Nigerians, in this case, Pidgin English speakers who cut a massive swathe around the country.
When the Hausa use the word ‘wahala’ they use it in its correct placement as non-migrant word,
while Nigerian users of NSE avoid its usage in their sentence construction as a non-English
word, even if they can speak Pidgin English.

‘Wayo’ is another Nigerian sociolect, with distinct origin in Hausa before migrating to
Nigerianism. In its original Hausa version, it has two meanings: the first is that of cunning and
its synonymic variants: shrewdness, artfulness, wiliness, trickery, finesse, intrigue, slyness,
deception, etc. For instance,

NSE He is not a trustworthy person Pidgin Na wayo man

He is too clever-by-half He has too much wayo

The second meaning is passage of boyhood. For instance:

Hau An haife ni a Sakkwato, amma NSE I was born in Sokoto but grew
na yi wayo na a Legas up in Lagos

In this example, the protagonist uses the original word as a sociolect which provides a radically
different, but acceptable alternative variant to its other synonymic derivatives. The Hausa also
use ‘wayo’ to refer to a child’s lack of deftness, knowledge/experience of things because of
tender age:

Hau Yaro ne, ba shi da wayo NSE He is a child, and not wise enough
Ɗan kauye ne, ba shi da wayo He is from a village, a simpleton

The late Nigerian Afrobeat musician Fela Anikulapo Kuti (1938-1997) brought out the word,
wayo, as a Nigerian sociolect more forcefully in his political protest performance of Army
Arrangement (Celluloid Records, 1985) as in the following few lines:

Them set up inquiry/

Them say money no lost o/
Them dabaru everybody/
…

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 Give me money, put am together/
*Army arrangement!*/
Wayo wayo, put am together.../
*Army arrangement!*/
…
Na wayo government we dey o/
E gba mi o/
Na rigima government we dey o/
Ye paripa o/

It is interesting that Fela’s lyrics also used two other Hausa words, dabaru (pl; dabara, sing.)
which refer to ‘deception’ in his verse, but actually means ‘resourcefulness’ in Hausa. The
second Hausa word is ‘rigima’, which means constantly living beyond one's income but is used
colloquially as troublesomeness. In this context of protest (whether Hausa or Nigerianism as
used in Fela’s Army Arrangement protest song), however, it is also used to refer to seeking for
trouble, viz:

Hau Ya faye rigima NSE He is always seeking trouble

Fela’s use of wayo, dabaru and rigima in the performance is the provision of Hausa immigrant
sociolects that has gained common Nigerian currency, although ‘dabaru’ and ‘rigima’ are not
regularly used Nigerianisms.

The final Hausa sociolect used by Fela was ‘yanga’. Fela’s use of the word Yanga was in his
1972 performance, ‘Trouble Sleep, Yanga Go Wake Am’ from the album Music of Fela -
Roforofo Fight (Jofabro Records, 1972), although in a different context, as the following verse 1
shows:

When trouble sleep/

Yanga go wake am/
Waking him dey find/
Palaver, he dey find/
Palaver, he go get-e o)/
Palaver, he go get/
Palaver/

Yanga in this context refers to ‘palaver’, an informal English word referring to unnecessary
attention or fuss. The song therefore refers to ‘let sleeping dogs lie’ mantra. The word,
popularized through Fela’s music in the southern part of Nigeria has become a Nigerianism
Hausa immigrant retaining its original Hausa meaning where it means “putting on airs and
graces”, something akin to showing ‘class’ or taking time to do something due to perceived
importance of the protagonist, or even refusing to do something. For example:

Hau Ki/ka daina yi min yanga NSE [gender] Stop putting on airs and graces;
Stop wasting my time

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‘Awuf; may not sound Hausa, but it is, and the actual spelling is ‘a-wufu’, which means
‘worthless’ or ‘cheaply’. The Hausa often use it to refer to items (mainly clothing or electrical
items) claimed to be ‘Igbo-made’ or ‘ɗan jabu or jabu (from Ijebu Ode, a town on Ogun State of
Nigeria), both expressions referring to low quality of overseas imported items purchased from
these areas, at least in the early 1950s and 1960s. This was at the same time the Hausa expression
‘okirka’ was used to refer to second-hand clothing from Okrika in Rivers, which was a port
town, and therefore a transit for goods, especially clothing, from overseas, most of which were
second-hand. The Hausa use ‘okirka’ to refer to second-hand clothing, and ‘ɗan jabu’ or ‘jabu’
for substandard products of low quality. Both okirka and jabu are adapted idiolects but have
become northern Nigerian sociolects due to their use even among non-Hausa linguistic groups. It
is instructive that Shagamu, a Hausa trading camp which became a settlement (‘zango’) is less
than 40 kilometers from Ijebu Ode, and the use of ‘ɗan jabu’ by the Hausa was a migrant use of
the word for the products they purchased from nearby Ijebu Ode and eventually transported to
the north. It is likely that these ‘sub-standard’ goods were only imported to these areas from
where they were distributed to Hausaland and acquired their unsavory status. The word, ‘Awuf’,
however, has migrated into Nigerianism, retaining its base Hausa lexical meaning of something
unworthy, or something that is free of charge (FOC) because it has no value.

Another intangible immigrant is the Hausa word ‘cuwa-cuwa’. It actually means eager to be off,
or to see what is coming, akin to people clustering around and gawking at an accident curious to
see what is happening. It became a Nigerianism sociolect in the early 1990s when fuel queues
started forming due to fuel shortage at gas stations. Often motorists would come out of their
vehicles and go to the gas pumps, just looking – the bunching-up of people at the gas pumps is
actually ‘cuwa-cuwa’ – for they are all eager to see what is going on. However, it jumped into
Nigerianism when other motorists thought that those at the pumps were trying to jump the
queues, so they pleaded with them to ‘stop cuwa-cuwa at the pumps/ku daina cuwa-cuwa wajen
bayar da fetur’. Non-Hausa security forces – mainly soldiers, drafted to keep peace – thought the
word means crookedness. and from there it acquired its lexical expansion to Nigerianism as
referring to anything that is shady or not straight. Its neologistic variants are ‘wuru-wuru’, ‘gada-
gada’, ‘mago-mago’, ‘muna-muna’, etc.

Similarly turenchi (proper: turanci) is a Hausa compound idiolect for English language that has
acquired Nigerianism, as in dogon turenchi, ‘big grammar’. The Hausa call the English
‘Bature’, from where his language, ‘Turanci’ is derived. Yet in its original derivation, Bature
referred to a Turkish person, viz, Baturke (someone from Turkey) and became corrupted to
Bature to refer to White people Uniquely in Kano, the term Baturke became corrupted to Bature
because the Kano central mosque was built by the Turks and during the process of building it,
the engineers came to be referred to as Baturkawa. Historically and etymologically, however, a
person from England would be Baingile, (cf. Baindiye, someone from India) but the Hausa used
Nasara (a White Christian, regardless of nationality) to refer to the British before adopting the
Bature idiolect and its associated migrant linguistic connotations.

A final example of Hausa immigrant sociolect that has become a common Nigerianism is
‘shikena’. The actual Hausa expression is ‘shi ke nan’ which means ‘that is all’. The improper
structure in Hausa is ‘shikenan’ as a single word; but it is actually three words (shi – that; ke – is;

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nan – it/all) compacted together. The sociolect ‘shikena’ mispronounced by non-Hausa and used
as a Nigerianism adopted its root reference to ‘finality’ in any discourse or decision, or ‘that’s it’.

Reversible Intangible Migrants

The Yoruba of Nigeria have also contributed intangible immigrant words to Nigerian sociolect.
For example, ‘Oga’, a Yoruba word spelt as ọ̀gá, meaning chief, boss, master, etc., has become
domesticated as a Nigerian sociolect for a ‘master’, or at least someone who is generous, across
linguistic groups. In some instances, it even refers to feminist tendencies of women. Despite its
appearance in the Oxford Dictionary as of Yoruba origin, there are contestations about its exact
origin. However, regardless of its origin, it has become virtually African sociolect. For instance

NPE She is the real oga at the top NSE She is the master/in control

Used in a somewhat derogatory fashion, a woman being “oga at the top” refers to a woman who
is assertive, or highly aware of her rights, and who is in control of a particular situation; reversing
the situation where the ‘oga’ is always the male creature and is expected to be at ‘the top’ – both
a sexual innuendo and social power handle.

Another common example of Yoruba Nigerianism is ‘bolekaja’. In its original context, it means
‘come down, let’s fight’, so it is apparently a concinnated word, just like Hausa ‘shikena’. As
Anyaegbunam 1993, p. iii), pointed out, the term bolekaja

derives from the mass transit system in Lagos and other parts of Western Nigeria that
depends in part on rather unreliable vehicles known as mammy-wagons. The bodies of
mammy-wagons are locally built from wood and corrugated iron sheets while the chassis,
though originally imported, are often junk-yard retrievals that may already be past their
prime.

It subsequently came to be used as a Nigerianism sociolect to refer to any ‘road-side’,

‘worthless’ items, behaviors or even thoughts considered to be of little or no value. Ironically,
the wooden-bodied trucks are still as strong, reliable and in use on Nigerian roads as ever –
belying the perception of their ultimate low quality consumerism, such that radical Pan-African
writers like Chinweizu, Jemie & Madubuike (1983) described themselves as ‘bolekaja critics’
due to their staunch belief in rescuing Africa's prose literature from what they perceived as the
dominant Eurocentric criticism (Maduka, 1989).

Other migrant Yoruba words domesticated and seemingly rooted in the Hausa language included
‘rake’ (sugar cane), ‘titi’ (highway/road’), ‘amalanke’ (hand cart), ‘anini’ (military officer’s
star/a coin), ‘ashana’ (matches).

Hausa, the Sahara, and the Arabic Language

As Awagana & Wolff (2009) pointed out, Arabic stands out as the most frequent donor language
to Hausa language. This was because of the contact between Hausa and Islam, though not Arabs,
since 13th century. Islam was brought to Hausa by Wangara merchant clerics (Palmer, 1908),
and contact with the Arabs was only through scholar-travelers who visited courts of the various
rulers of Hausaland. Arabs started migration to the Hausa cities of Katsina and Kano due to the

11
commercial potentials of the cities as the terminus of the trans-Saharan trade, bringing goods and
services across the Sahara. They eventually began to settle in Katsina before moving to Kano due
to greater commercial viability of Kano. The intrusion of intangible immigrant languages into
Hausa lexicon, however, had more to do with the earlier African Muslim contact between the
Hausa through Islamic texts, than any social contact with the latter Arab merchants who
maintained, by and large, an in-group cohesion, rarely mingling with their African hosts, with
very few intermarriages across the races. Because of this in-group barrier, the Arabs have not
really contributed to the Hausa vocabulary through social discourse. As Awagana, & Ekkehard
Wolff (2009, p.150) further noted,

in the context of African languages, contact scenarios, routes and intermediaries even for
clearly borrowed words are hard to establish and almost impossible to prove beyond
doubt. The reasons are scarcity of data on potential donor or intermediary languages, lack
of historical documentation and of methodologically sound reconstructions, lack of
robust dialectological evidence even for the target language. Judgment, therefore, often
remains intelligent guesswork

The intangibility of language as a migrant is demonstrated in the relationship between Arabic

and Hausa languages. According to Abubakar (1972), as much as 40% of the corpus of words
that constitute Hausa language is made up of Arabic words, especially from 1750-1960. More
contemporary usage of Hausa indicated the high level of lexical borrowings from Arabic and
other languages in Africa (Greenberg 1947, Yalwa 1992, El-Shazly 1987, Baldi 1992, 1995) and
other languages in Africa such as Kanuri, Tamashek, etc. (Greenberg 1960, Brauner 1964,
Gouffé 1974, Hoffmann 1970, Wexler 1980, Baldi 1995, Skinner 1981, Kossmann 2005 and
Aichatou 2020).

Thus, the trade between the Hausa, Arabs, Tuaregs, as well as contact with Nigerian ethnicities
had all contributed to inward intangible migration of words and expressions into the Hausa
language, often obscuring the origin of the words in the lexical borrowing. The Hausa word for
“diplomacy” (‘diblomasiyya/diplomaciyya’) for instance, is the same as for Arabic which the
Hausa acquired through contact with the Arabs; and it is the domestication of the English word,
‘diplomacy’. The Arabs convert ‘p’ to ‘b’ in the written, and often, spoken form (e.g. Sudanese
version of Arabic) thus, for instance, ‘Pepsi’ is ‘Bebsi’. Similarly, ‘canary’ migrated from Arabic
to Hausa as ‘kanari’, the yellow crested bird, which was kept as a house pet among the more
affluent Hausa due to its melodic chirps. Table 2 shows other lexical borrowings into the Hausa
language, some derived from open sources on the internet.

Table 2. West African Lexical Borrowings in Hausa

Berber Hausa English Pulaar Hausa English

Ayaran ayari caravan Allah seini alasaini (pl) May Allah make you happy
takarde takarda paper All reini alaraini (pr) May Allah protect you
takoba takobi sword Allah sabbi nane alasubbinani (h) May Allah prolong your life
cokal cokali spoon kindirmu kindirmo curdled milk
kanwa kanwa potassium bukkaro bukka hut
ejaq jaki donkey burtol burtali cattle path
aurak auraki tooth brush jalloru jallo gourd jerry can

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 Berber Hausa English Pulaar Hausa English
akala akala focus burugal burugali kitchen utensil
azurf azurfa siver baff baffa uncle (paternal)
mamaki mamaki surprise kawu kawu uncle (maternal)
ashiq ice firewood goggo gwaggo aunt (paternal female)
tindi turmi mortar ndottijo dattijo old man/decorous behavior
sabro sauro mosquito ndottaku dattaku gentlemanly behavior
teku teku ocean

The trans-Saharan trade between Kano and northern Africa, passing through the Berber lands has
resulted in the domestication of words and expressions peculiar to the Berbers as a result of
contact and trade further down south (see, particularly, Kossman, 2005) This has enriched the
Hausa language since the domesticated words have now become ‘indigenous’ to their new
abode.

Further, the Hausa domestication of ‘immigrant’ Arab loanwords is associated with literacy and
prestige, since the Arabic language is the language of the Qur’ān. The more a Hausa speaker’s
inclusion and intonation of Arabic words in a conversation, the greater the prestige of the
speaker, for it communicates a high level of sophistication – much in the same way African
English speakers try as much as possible to imitate the ‘correct’ way of speaking English to
reflect their own sophistication. For the typical Muslim Hausa speaker, it is considered more
prestigious to gravitate towards Arabism in speech patters and use of immigrant words, than
English, regardless of the level of contemporary education of the speaker.

The case of Fulɓe language, or what the Hausa refer to as Fulatanci is extremely curious in
linguistic adaption. The jihād of 1804, variously labeled as religious (Adelẹyẹ, 1971), or
“Fulani” jihad (Last, 1974), in reference to the ethnicity of its progenitor Usman bin Fodiyo (or
Usman ɗan Fodiyo, as the Hausa refer to him, decimating the Arabic ‘ibn’ – son of – to its more
domesticated equivalent ‘ɗan’) created a form of colonialism in which power, spirituality, arms
and consequently hegemony, were brought to bear to conquer the Hausa states and install Fulani
dominance and aristocracy. However, the Fulani realized enough that their language was not
universal and had to communicate with their subjects in the dominant Hausa language;
eventually leading to the substitution of the Fulɓe language with Hausa, even in the ruling houses
– creating the curious situation of ‘immigrants’ who have lost their language. Thus the presence
of Fulɓe words in the Hausa language is few as indicated in Table 2.

Other Nigerian languages also immigrated into the Hausa language, being ‘clothed’ and
domesticated to the linguistic intonation of the Hausa. A list of a few of these intangible
immigrants into the Hausa language is a given in Table 3.

13
 Table 3. Nigerian Lexical Borrowings in Hausa

Kanuri Hausa English Yoruba Hausa English Nupe Hausa English

kasugu kasuwa Market paki Kwaki Garri gulu ungulu vulture
tubo turba path/road kpeno kwano Metal bowl gbamgba agwagwa duck
sango sango gun harpoon agogo agogo watch kplaba kwalba bottle
fure fure flower apoti akwati box iyelye alele Moin-moin
tambari tambari seal gele gyale Head cover bente bante pant
algaita algaita trumpet fshana ashana matches
ganga ganga drum dokita likita doctor
birni birni city patapata kwata-kwata finally
goyi gwani expert pali kwali carton
yarima yarima prince gangan ganga drum

It is interesting to note the onomatopoeic nature of the domestications in most cases. In Yoruba,
for instance, the word for box, ‘apoti’ became the Hausa ‘akwati’, sharing similar tonal qualities.
In such cases of intangible immigrants being domesticated in their new homes, the question that
begs to be answered was, what word do the Hausa use for boxes (as well as other objects with
local equivalent) – or was it that they had no boxes until they came in contact with the Yoruba?

Conclusions
With these evidences of intangible migration of language as adopted, adapted, and loanwords,
the question then becomes, what is the specific gravity of identity? I will deliberately not answer
this question, as there is no answer to it. However, going back to my site of contestation, I would
like to use the template of racial identity in northern Nigeria. As Sowell (1996, p. 38), migration
is not just a merely a relocation of bodies but, more fundamentally, a redistribution of skills,
experience, and other ‘human capital’ across the planet. It is the process of cultural change that
has transformed nations and continents.’ It is the cultural exchange emphasis that I would want
to close this discourse through language, migration and identity. My arguments, so far, have been
on acquisition of loanwords from one language to another. The loanwords incorporated in
various languages have nevertheless enabled such language users to retain a cohesive identity.
This is because adoption and usage of key loanwords might be just for social, rather than in-
group discourse and conversations – thus retaining the overall ‘herd’ or ‘group’ identity.

For centuries, people have engaged in a series of migratory movements along various national
corridors as traders, refugees, scholars, merchants and opportunists. Such movements – of both
human and material goods – more recently seen in economic context as globalization has
subsequently increased the complexity of ethnic configurations of communities throughout the
ages and defined how isolated and monolithic communities construct their identity and sense of
nationhood.

Thus words, as intangible immigrants weave in and out of societies, countries, continents and
change status from being idiolect to sociolect where they are adopted as belonging to any
community of users, regardless of the source of origin – thus making them truly migrants, as they
have no intension of reverting back to their origin and leaving the lexicon of their adopters.

14
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