Englishism in the Renditions of Hausa Personal Names in the Cyberspace: Emerging Evidence from Facebook

The English and Hausa languages have been in contact since the last 2 to 3 centuries, and ever since English has continued to be influential on Hausa. The historic contact provided and continues to provide capacities for linguistic interferences with Hausa by English in a variety of ways. This paper examines how in today’s alluring cyberspace English interferes with Hausa in the domain of the Hausa personal names (HPNs) used as Facebook account labels, thus highlighting the different graphemic representations typical of the English language writing system that are willingly incorporated therein to supplant some of the normal Hausa graphemes, therefore, provides insights on graphemic interferences with Hausa by English in the web sphere, as strong evidence proving this aspect of linguistic interference abound in Facebook. Irrespective of their linguistic affiliations, Facebookers necessarily require the creation of a personal account(s) to gain formal access to the popular social network, hence the resort to using their names as their personal account labels to the network. Invariably, the Hausa-speaking Facebookers tend to use their names to meet this online requirement. Guided by the tenet of descriptive linguistics and Herring’s (2010) expanded web content analysis paradigm, the paper adopts the descriptive qualitative research design to investigate Englishism. In the end, the paper discovers that the entire HPNs examined present evidence of English graphemes replacing the normal Hausa counterparts, a scenario evidential to a form of online interference with Hausa by English.