The circulation of transborder media has become a significant site for linguistic innovation, particularly among youth populations who actively appropriate foreign cultural resources. In Northern Nigeria, Hausa-dubbed Indian films constitute a pervasive media landscape, yet little is known about how adolescents transform cinematic language through everyday peer interaction. Existing scholarship on media-induced language change often privileges lexical borrowing over the pragmatic and indexical work through which young speakers decontextualise and recontextualise mediated discourse. This gap obscures how film-derived expressions acquire locally negotiated meanings beyond their original cinematic functions. This study draws on recontextualization theory and mediated discourse analysis, and conceptualizes adolescent language use as selective communicative appropriation rather than passive reproduction. The study uses ethnographic observation, semi-structured interviews, and qualitative analysis of a focused corpus of adolescent peer interaction in Taraba North, and traces how Hausa expressions from Indian films shift in meaning and social function as they move from screen to speech. Four trajectories of linguistic transformation emerged: meaning retention, extension, pragmatic transformation, and re-indexicalization. Evaluative reversal proved particularly salient: expressions associated in cinematic discourse with insult, condemnation, or confrontation acquired humorous, affiliative, or competence-marking functions in peer interaction. These transformations were evidenced through transactional responses, laughter, repetition, reciprocal usage, and participant explanations, triangulated across film sources, observed use, and participant accounts. Adolescents selectively appropriated forms whose social recognizability, expressive force, and relevance to existing peer practices supported their uptake, while other recognizable film expressions lacking interactional relevance remained unused. This study advances scholarship on media and language change by presenting that the movement from screen to speech is better understood as selective communicative appropriation and peer-group recontextualization than as simple lexical borrowing. It achieves this by showing how transborder film resources become part of locally meaningful youth repertoires through situated interaction. The study submits that mediated discourse acquires locally negotiated meanings through youth peer practices, this will reveal adolescents as active agents in the semiotic transformation of global media flows.