EXPLORING THE SEMIOTICS OF HAUSA AND FULFULDE LANGUAGES IN NIGERIA AND THE INFLUENCE OF ARABIC

Abstract

This study explores the semiotics of Hausa and Fufulde languages in Northern Nigeria, and how they derive a lot of linguistic and paralinguistic, as well as cultural behaviors from Arabic language and culture. The research selected these languages because of their prestige as the major languages in Northern Nigeria, each claiming more than a million of speakers. The main aim of this research is to preserve the uniqueness of these languages and how the influence of Arabic has added semiotic relics to them. This is with the twin objectives of promoting inter-cultural dialogues as well as fostering shared ethnolinguistic heritage as a means of enhancing sustainable socio-cultural development of Northern Nigeria of diverse cultures. The data were collected across these languages using unstructured questionnaire and administered to two categories of respondents; eight linguistic scholars in each of the languages under study and eight traditional title holders in the respective traditional institutions in; Kano, Katsina, Taraba and Gombe states, respectively. These were analyzed using qualitative method, describing the linguistic and cultural resonance that culminated to semiotic systems in the two languages.  the research findings revealed that there is a substantial similarity on the semiotics of the selected languages. This is not unconnected with the historical fact that Arabic, as the language of Islam, had had strong influences on the languages through numerous semiotic nuances. Arabic linguistic codes such as loan words, morpho-syntactic and other linguistic and, indeed, paralinguistic behaviors such as dressing code, signs and symbols inherent in the doctrine of Islam, are found profusely in the vocabularies of these languages. By extension, Arabic script, known as Ajami, became the written script with which Hausa, in particular, and to a large extent, Fufulde, use to communicate their thoughts, long before the advent of Western literacy in Nigeria. These semiotic correlations have, in a substantial way, brought about cultural affinity between these languages which also affected other minority languages in Northern Nigeria.