Introduction
1.1 Background To The Study
Many children born in Nigerian urban areas are exposed to two to more languages because of the heterogeneous nature of the cities/towns. One of such languages is the language of the environment; the other may be their mother tongue L1, English language which is the official language of the country and bits of Arabic language which is the language of Islam. That is if Islam is one of the predominant religions in the metropolis.
Kaduna metropolis used by the researcher as the scope is a cosmopolitan city and hence heterogeneous in nature. This influences language use among the speakers in the metropolis due to the contact of different languages. A child born in this environment is exposed to a minimum of two other languages aside his mother tongue. They include Hausa (language of the environment) and English language (official language of the nation and medium of instruction) and Arabic used for worship among the Muslim faithful.
Language contact occurs in a variety of phenomena which include language convergence, and re-lexification, other products include: pidgin, creoles, code-switching, code-mixing etc. Banjo, (1983), Madaki, (1983), Pariola (1983) in Olaoye (1991), also state that, when languages come into contact, a variety of phenomena take place which are bilingualism, borrowing, re-lexification, code-switching, code-mixing and perhaps language death.
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