Hausa Chat Jargon: Semantic Extension Versus Borrowing

Abstract

A corpus of WhatsApp chats reveals how Hausa-speaking youth have adopted and spread homegrown Hausa terms, via semantic extension, for the actions (e.g. chatting, forwarding), objects (e.g. image) and space (e.g. group, online/offline) associated with computer-mediated communication rather than strictly borrowing from English chat jargon. Along with other contextual factors, this study reviews the linguistic forms (including source language), range of terminology, and frequency of occurrence of specialized chat terminology found in this corpus, representing 56 different interlocutors in 40 different dyads of chat excerpts.