Hausa

Introduction

There are a number of theories about the origin of the Hausa people who live in northern Nigeria and several other countries of Northern Africa. One theory holds that all Hausa once lived by Lake Chad, but were forced to move west when the water level dropped. Another theory identifies the Hausa as desert nomads who lived in the Sahara. Some scholars believe that there is a link between the Hausa and the people of Ethiopia based on shared worship of the sun, practiced prior to the arrival of Islam and Christianity. Finally, many Hausa believe that their ancestors were Arabs whose descendants founded the Hausa city-states. The Hausa have been Muslim since the 14th century, and have converted many other Nigerian tribes to Islam through contact, trade, and jihads.

North Africa Map

Status
Hausa is spoken as a first language by an estimated 24 million speakers and as a second language by an additional 15 million people across a broad band of countries, including Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Congo, Eritrea, Ghana, Niger, Sudan, and Togo. (Ethnologue).

Hausa is a lingua franca of Muslim populations in much of West Africa. Every city of any size in West Africa has a large Hausa community.

Hausa has a number of geographically determined dialects:

Eastern Hausa dialects include Kano, Katagum and Hadejiya;
Western Hausa dialects include Sokoto, Katsina, Gobirawa, Adarawa, Kebbawa and Zamfarawa;
Northern Hausa dialects include Arewa and Arawa considered to be the standard heard on both Nigerian radio and TV and international Hausa broadcasting such as BBC Hausa, Deutsche Welle, The Voice of America (VOA) Hausa, and others.

Structure

Sound System

Vowels
In the standard Romanized Hausa writing system, there are just five alphabetic symbols representing vowels a, e, i, o, u. However, in pronunciation, each of these letters can represent either the short or the long variant of these vowels.

Click here to learn more about long and short vowels in Hausa and to listen to their pronunciation. Test yourself for fun to see if you can hear the differences between them.

Consonants
Hausa has 23 to 25 consonant sounds, depending on the dialect of the speaker.

Glottalized consonants
Hausa has five characteristic consonant sounds. Linguists call them "glottalized" sounds because the space between the vocal cords (glottis) is constricted during the pronunciation of these consonants.

two of the glottalized sounds are implosive, i.e. the air is sucked inward as the sounds are produced;
two are ejective, i.e. the air is "ejected" or forced out with a "squeezed" sound;
one sound combines the glottal stop with "y".
Click here to listen to Hausa consonants. Test yourself for fun to see if you can hear the difference between glottalized and non-glottalized consonants.

Biliabial /f/
The Hausa sound /f/ is not pronounced like the /f/ of Indo-European languages. Speakers of these languages pronounce /f/ by bringing the lower lip into contact with the upper teeth. In Hausa, however, /f/ is pronounced by bringing the lips together and blowing the air through them.
Click here to listen to the pronunciation of /f/ in Hausa.

Geminate (doubled) consonants
All consonants in Hausa can be geminated, or doubled, by holding them for a longer period than their single counterparts. Whether a consonant is single or double makes a difference in word meaning, e.g., daba "parade" and dabba "animal".

Tones
Hausa is a tonal language. Each of its five vowels a, e, i, o and u may have low tone, high tone, and falling tone. French accents (grave, acute, and circumflex) are typically used for representing tones. However, in everyday writing, tones are not marked.

Low tone	à, è, ì, ò, ù
High tone	á, é, í, ó, ú
Falling tone	â, ê, î, ô, û

Click on the name of the news service to listen to news broadcasts in Hausa
BBC Hausa
Deutsche Welle
The Voice of America (VOA) Hausa

Grammar

Noun phrase
Hausa nouns are marked for gender and number. Feminine nouns usually end in -a, masculine nouns end in anything but -a. Most Hausa nouns have plural forms. There are no simple rules for predicting the plural form. Here are some examples:

	Masculine	Feminine
Singular	yaro "boy"	yarinya "girl"
Plural	yara "boys"	yanmata "girls"

Adjectives agree with nouns in gender and number, e.g.,

	Masculine	Feminine
Singular	dogon yaro "tall boy"	doguwar yarinya "tall girl"
Plural	dogwayen yara "tall children"

Sometimes, Hausa uses nouns to modify other nouns, e.g.,

Singular	yaro mai wayo "boy of strength"
Plural	yara masu wayo "children of strength"

Numbers follow nouns, e.g., saniya d'aya "cow one."

Verb phrase

Tenses
Hausa verb tenses are quite different from those in Indo-European languages in which the tense form of the verb tells about the basic time of the event, e.g., present tense means that the action is happening at the time of speaking, past tense tells one that the action took place before time of speaking, and future tense tells one that the action of the verb has not begun at the time of speaking. But in Hausa, the tense form tells one about the time of the event relative to some temporal reference. If no time context is mentioned, the assumption is that the time of reference is the moment of speaking. However, if the time of reference is in the past or the future, English must change the tense marking, whereas Hausa continues to use the same forms.
English marks tense by changes in the verb form (enter/entered/ entering) and/or addition of auxiliary verbs (have, had, will, are, were, etc.). In Hausa, for the most part, the verb itself does not change to mark tense differences. Instead different sets of subject pronouns are used, sometimes with the pronoun combined with some additional particle, such as preceding za, which marks future. Here are some examples from Hausa Grammar Online:

	English	Hausa
Past (past context)	Yesterday by 3:00 they had entered.	Jiya da 3:00 sun shiga.
Past (future context)	Tomorrow at 3:00 they will have entered.	Gobe da 3:00 sun shiga.
Future (past context)	Yesterday at 3:00 they were about to enter.	Jiya da 3:00 za su shiga.
Future (future context)	Tomorrow at 3:00 they will enter.	Gobe da 3:00 za su shiga.
Present (past context)	Yesterday at 3:00 they were entering.	Jiya da 3:00 suna shiga.
Present (future context)	Tomorrow at 3:00 they will be entering.	Gobe da 3:00 suna shiga.

The verb "to be"
Hausa has no verb equivalent to "be." It uses several other constructions instead.
Click here to find out more about "be" sentences in Hausa.
The verb "to have"
Hausa has no verb "to have." It expresses the concept of having by using the preposition da "with," for example:

Ina	da	kudi
I	with	money
I have money.

Vocabulary

Hausa has borrowed many words from Arabic, especially in the areas of religion and technology.

Writing

Hausa is written with two different scripts.

Ajami
Hausa has been written with an adapted version of the Arabic script called Ajami since the early part of the 17th century. Most of the early Hausa literature was Islamic poetry or religious in nature. Ajami is still used today, mainly for writing poetry. There is no standard spelling system for Hausa written with the Arabic script so there is some variation in spelling among different writers.

Boko
In the 20th century, Ajami was greatly overshadowed by the Romanized Hausa script called Boko developed in the 19th century. Today, Boko is the main alphabet for Hausa speakers.

In addition to representing the glottal stop by an apostrophe, the Boko alphabet has several additional letters to represent Hausa sounds:

	hooked "b" representing an implosive /b/
	hooked "d" representing an implosive /d/
	hooked "k" representing an ejective /k/

Romanized Hausa orthography does not mark vowel length or tone.

Click here for more details about Hausa orthography.

Take a look at Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Hausa (written in Boko).

Can you recognize any words in it?
Can you find words with geminated consonants?
Are most syllables open or closed?

Su dai yan-adam, ana haifuwarsu ne duka yantattu, kuma kowannensu na da mutunci da hakkoki daidai da na kowa. Suna da hankali da tunani, saboda haka duk abin da za su aikata wa juna, ya kamata su yi shi a cikin yan-uwanci.

Translation
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Resources

Hausa Language and Culture Resources
UCLA Language Materials Project (search under "Hausa")
Less Commonly Taught Languages Course Offering
UCLA Hausa Home Page
Hausa Online Grammar
Teach Yourself Hausa.com
Hausa Online Dictionary
Resources on the Hausa Language