LANGUAGE CONTACT: SEMANTIC DOMAINS OF HAUSA LOAN WORDS IN KANURI

Abstract

The paper makes an attempt to identify and study those linguistic items borrowed from Hausa to Kanuri with special attention to their semantic fields. Borrowing is a phenomenon which is as old as human social, economic, and administrative contact. As far as contact is established between two or more different linguistic communities there is tendency for linguistic borrowing to take place. Therefore, despite the fact that the languages under study belong to different language phyla, there exists linguistic borrowing between them. Additionally, they are neighbors for decades. There are certainly various compelling reasons for one language or dialect to borrow from another language or dialect. The paper focuses attention on semantic fields of the borrowed words. Through the research, it is established that loan words are categorized into different semantic fields as clearly established by Semantic Field Theory (SFT) that, lexeme that are semantically related belong to the same group. Thus, the Theoretical Framework adopted by the paper is Semantic Field Theory (SFT). The research adopts two procedures as a source for data collection. These procedures are primary and secondary sources. The primary source includes unobtrusive observation while the secondary sources include written records. The paper concludes that Kanuri a Nilo-Saharan language borrowed some lexical items from Hausa language which is a Chadic language.