Nativazation of Hausa Loanwords in Kanuri through Deglottalization and Sonorization

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).