Zaar-Hausa-English Code Mixing

The purpose of this paper is to examine how a minority language that is healthy is used in two different contexts : (A) an urban context, with educated speakers who are fluent in the two main vehicular languages of the area : English and Hausa ; (B) a rural context with speakers who hardly speak a few words of Pidgin English, but are quite fluent in Hausa. The interest of this study lies in the way it reveals the processes at work in borrowing and grammaticalisation. It gives a synchronic view of diachronic processes at work. Words are borrowed, beginning in the pragmatic domain (emotions, feelings, modality) then get integrated into the area of topicality verging on sentence complexification (with the so-called Hausa modal particles heavily borrowed). Then finally, aspectual verbs build a sub-area of Zaar grammar where auxiliarity is being developed.