This paper establishes a normative distribution of Nigerian Arabic nouns in the two existing possessive structures, based on a corpus of non-codeswitched texts. The distribution of English lexical insertions in a corpus of codeswitched texts, significantly deviates from these normative patterns. The notion of iconicity is used to explain the insertional patterns and after a brief test of the iconicity hypothesis against insertional patterns in Hausa and Standard Arabic, it is examined whether the codeswitched variety constitutes a code in itself.