By Prof. Abdalla Uba Adamu
Let me start with a context. It happened on June 27, 2024, Gabon’s Show on YouTube.
“Zarmalulu no work” was an expression uttered by TikTok influencer Sayyada Sadiya Haruna, describing the state of her marriage to another TikToker, Abubakar Ibrahim, a Hausa Rapper based in Kano, northern Nigeria, and known by the stage name G-Fresh Alamin. She used the expression during her interview with Hadiza Aliyu Gabon, a Kannywood (Hausa cinema of northern Nigeria) film actress, in an episode of Gabon’s YouTube Show, “Gabon,” on June 27, 2024. Haruna used the expression to inform Gabon and her viewers that G-Fresh was impotent on their wedding night, using ‘Zarmalulu’ as a social code for his non-performing reproductive organ.
The expression, which quickly became a meme referring to the male sexual organ and its (dis)abilities, became a trending term in Hausaphone social media counterculture, and G-Fresh, usually full of swagger and macho posturing, was highly ridiculed and his swagger deflated, as it were. In this process, Haruna has provided males with an easy way of explaining their erectile dysfunction to either their partners or their healthcare provider in a less embarrassing and amusing way. The use of the term openly reveals a growing vocabulary of erotic neologisms in Hausa social media and reflects the emergence of what I refer to as Hausa digital counterculture.
This media incidence – which received massive views, significantly improving Gabon’s financial standing – reflects one of the fascinating aspects of language development within the context of media anthropology. I am pretty sure that Margaret Mead, the doyen of cultural anthropologists, would have welcomed social media and its potential in studying digital natives. Safer, too. With the increasing creation of conventional and alternative communities on social media, a new discipline has emerged to enable people to study others without the necessity of being in the same physical space and time with them. So, what exactly is “media anthropology”?
Media anthropology is the ethnographic and critical study of how media—especially digital and social media—are embedded in the cultural, social, political, and economic lives of people. It is a subfield of anthropology that examines how people create, utilise, interpret, and are influenced by media in their daily lives. It blends the traditional ethnographic methods of anthropology—such as participant observation and in-depth interviews—with the analysis of media technologies and content.
My initial focus was on Hausa literature and its transformations – from physical print to online publishing, then to the film industry – encompassing feature films and distribution through tapes, CDs, DVDs, and YouTube series. I then moved on to music, from griot wordsmiths to rap and hip hop. It was all pretty exciting. Then, social media made its entrance and created multiple new entries into the field.
As a media anthropologist, I immerse myself in communities—both online and offline—to understand how people engage with digital media. For this study, I focused primarily on Facebook as a social network. Hundreds of communities were created on Facebook—mainly by young people—that discuss a wide range of topics, providing a rich source of data concerning youth subcultures and how social networks offer a subversive template for creating new identities and expressions.
As I swing from one community to another – using Robert Kozinet’s Netnographic methods – I began to notice a new pattern of language usage among young Hausa online digital natives. Then I started gathering new words and expressions that offer alternative meanings to their conventional ones. For the most part, they tended to be innocuous, while hiding a deeper, often darker meaning, and are essentially communicated to ingroup members of the communities. Quite rapidly enough, some of the words began to take on a new urban lexicon on their own.
A typical example is “capacity,” an innocuous word that means exactly what it says: maximum production or containment. Yet, digital natives have turned it into “kafasiti” to indicate an urban cool, swagger, ability, capability, “arrived”, etc. The word is now used in multiple forms and contexts to refer to attainment of either distinction or class (“Alaji, wallahi an baza kafasiti a bikin nan”).
But, then, old words have always had new meanings in Hausaphone urban language use. For instance, “shege” is literally a bastard in Hausa, but recontextualised to mean “an expert” or “outstanding.” “Mugu” (bad) became an adjective for extremities (“mugun kyau”, extreme beauty). “Arne” (pagan) transformed into contemporary “bro” (kai arne, yaya dai/yo, bro, wazzup?). “Kwaro” (insect) translates into a tenacious, usually studious person. For southern Nigerians, “Aboki” is an imagined insult referring to any northerner, whether Hausa or not, rather than “friend,” its actual meaning.
Hausa digital natives utilise the unconventionality of the social media they inhabit to create neologisms that often reflect hidden, dark, or altered meanings, frequently dealing with in-group lexicons. After trawling through various sites and TikTok videos, I was able to gather approximately 35 neologisms and incorporate them into a paper I am still working on.
Looking at these digital coinages and the transformation of words, I was struck by the fact that many of them refer to bawdy or sexually suggestive language along the entire sexual preference spectrum. They tend to be more common in social networks (e.g., Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal), where interactions are mainly conversational, than in visual social media (e.g., TikTok, Instagram). The reason is that visuality often identifies the person easily, and in Kano, an Islamicate state in northern Nigeria, this could lead to prosecution on moral grounds. On social networking sites, users often use aliases instead of their real names. Such anonymity gives them the freedom to express their thoughts and use these neologisms in their correct grammatical sense. The sentences are meaningful only to in-group members, within or outside the online communities.
Examples include “Malam Zakari da almajirai biyu”, referring to the male reproductive organs. “Kaya” (load, baggage) referring to trophy (girl, money, etc), “tarkon alƙali” (judge’s trap/jailbait) for pedophilic behaviour, royal rumble (orgy) and murfi (cover) referring to lesbian activity.
As I noted, over 70% of the neologisms in my collection were bawdy and sexually slanted. Their creators chose the anonymity of online communities not only to create new coinages but also to perpetuate them, without any fear of social labelling or prosecution. Some of these words will gradually become part of conventional social usage, along with their attendant meanings. There is no stopping them. Their very existence highlights another way social media is influencing our culture, language, and traditions.
But, what do you think – good, bad, indifferent? Whatever your feeling, what can we do about it? Hausa is not the only language facing this, though. A recent book by Adam Aleksic, Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language” (July 15, 2025), reveals the international nature of this phenomenon through “algorithmic speech”. As the blurb indicates:
“From ‘brainrot’ memes and incel slang to the trend of adding ‘-core’ to different influencer aesthetics, the internet has ushered in an unprecedented linguistic upheaval. We’re entering an entirely new era of etymology, marked by the invisible forces that drive social media algorithms. Thankfully, Algospeak is here to explain. As a professional linguist, Adam Aleksic understands the gravity of language and its use: he knows how it has evolved and changed, how it reflects society, and how, in its everyday usage, we carry centuries of human history on our tongues…New slang phrases emerge and go viral overnight. Accents are shaped or erased on YouTube. Grammatical rules, loopholes, and patterns surface and transform language as we know it. Our interactions, social norms, and habits—both online and in person—shift into something completely different.”
No, I don’t have “eCopy” to Acibilistically share. You gotta buy the original print copy if you are interested in the way in which social media usage transforms contemporary language. I can give you the cover of the book for free, though!
