This book discusses Nigerian (Shuwa) Arab history, demography and social life pattern in Maiduguri. It describes codeswitching conversation among Shuwa Arabs in Maiduguri, by identifying English (E) and Standard Arabic (SA) lexical insertions used in Nigerian (Shuwa) Arabic (NA), Hausa (H) and Kanuri (K) languages in codeswitching discourse. Our analysis to the codeswitching corpus, shows integrations at different linguistic levels; While (SA) phonological system, show complete integrations into Nigerian Arabic phonology, English lexical items maintain their normative phonology in the data, but some considerable examples from data violate English phonological norms. At the morpho-phonological level, both (SA) and (E) lexical insertions used in the codeswitching data completely integrate into the Nigerian Arabic morph-phonological rule of stress and affixes. The zero marked (uninflected) insertions in their word class or category, integrate into Nigerian Arabic and Hausa Matrix languages, whose functional morpheme elements form the constituent structure occupied by the inserted lexical items. The study thus, revealed that, while (SA) lexical insertions show complete integration at all levels (Phonology, morphology, syntax), the English ones show integrations at the morpho-syntactic level, and a partial integration at the phonological level.

Jidda Hassan Juma’a holds a doctorate degree in General Linguistics from University of Maiduguri. He is a senior lecturer in the department of languages and linguistics at University of Maiduguri.