Concept
Hausa language
Overview
Hausa (; in Hausa: Harshen/Halshen Hausa /hawˈsa/; Ajami: هَرْشَن هَوْسَا) is a Chadic language spoken by over 94.5 million people in West Africa, primarily by the Hausa people in Niger (where it is the sole official language, having replaced French in 2025) and Nigeria. It serves as a lingua franca in most of northern Nigeria, southern Niger, as well as in northern Cameroon, Ghana (mainly in the north of the country, but also extensively among the Zongo communities all across the country, including in the capital, Accra), Benin and Togo, southern Chad, and parts of Sudan. Hausa also has a significant number of speakers in Côte d’Ivoire and the Central African Republic.
Hausa is a member of the Afroasiatic language family and is the most widely spoken language within the Chadic branch of that family. Hausa is tonal, using relative pitch both to distinguish words, and mark grammatical categories. Ethnologue estimated that it was spoken as a first language by some 58 million people and as a second language by another 36 million, bringing the total number of Hausa speakers to an estimated 94 million.
In Nigeria, the Hausa film industry is known as Kannywood.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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To the west of the river Triton, Libyans who are husbandmen next adjoin the Auses; they are accustomed to live in houses, and are called Maxyes. They let the hair grow on the right side of the head, and shave the left; and bedaub the body with vermilion: they say that they are descended from men who came from Troy. This region, and all the rest of Libya westward, is much more infested by wild beasts and more thickly…
Herodotus, The Boys' and Girls' Herodotus
States what Hausa language is.
This process of composition is sometimes found in its incipient stage—a stage in which the component words are temporarily united to signify some unnamed object, and do not (from lack of frequent use) permanently cohere. But in the majority of inferior languages, the process of “agglutination,” as it is called, has gone far enough to produce considerable stability in the compound words: there is a manifest…
Herbert Spencer, First Principles
States what Hausa language is.
The use of our own language has led us to neglect it so far as to forget it altogether. Let us study children and we shall soon learn it afresh from them. Nurses can teach us this language; they understand all their nurslings say to them, they answer them, and keep up long conversations with them; and though they use words, these words are quite useless. It is not the hearing of the word, but its accompanying…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile
States what Hausa language is.
Related ideas
- Circumflex
- Levant
- Mali
- Islamic world
- BBC
- North Africa
- Orthography
- Timbuktu
- Sudan
- Universal Declaration of Human Rights
- Sahara
- Vowel
- Yoruba language
- Arabian Peninsula
- Afroasiatic languages
- Lingua franca
- Latin script
- West Africa
- Arabic
- Egypt
- Dialect
- The Punch
Place in the tradition
Part of Language.