Hausa

Where it’s spoken

Hausa is the most widely spoken language in northern Nigeria and southern Niger, and serves as a trade lingua franca across West Africa from Ghana to Sudan. It is one of Nigeria’s three “majority” languages and a national language in Niger. Hausa BBC and other broadcasts reach tens of millions of listeners.

What it sounds like

Hausa is one of the few sub-Saharan African languages that is tonal (high and low tones) and has phonemic vowel length and contrast between glottalized (ejective and implosive) and plain consonants. The implosive ɓ, ɗ, and ƙ are distinctive. Word stress is predictable based on tone.

How it’s written

Hausa is written in two scripts: a Latin-based Boko script (the official orthography since the 1930s) and Ajami, a modified Arabic script used historically and still in some religious contexts. Tone and vowel length are marked in scholarly and pedagogical Boko but usually omitted in newspapers.

History

Hausa spread through the Sahel as the lingua franca of the medieval city-states of Hausaland, intensifying after the 19th-century Sokoto Caliphate. Colonial-era radio and modern Nollywood-style cinema have entrenched its regional reach.