Hausa phraseologisms as a source of data in ethnolinguistic studies

This paper studies phraseologisms as source of data in Hausa. The objective of the paper is to examine sources of Hausa phraseologisms, its functions and significance for ethnolinguistic studies,. It used several Hausa texts as source of data. The study discovered that Hausa has a rich phraseology, which has been developing for centuries to document the history of the people and their contacts with other people. In addition, it shows that examples of phrasal expressions which function in Nigerian Pidgin English confirm their areal connotations in terms of ways of language conceptualization. It also reveals that the comparative works on Hausa and other languages of the West African area may enhance the understanding of linguistic mechanisms and strategies, which establish the areas of language contact. Furthermore, the research discovered that West Africa is the region where many linguistic developments are shared by the languages of the area.