Hausa

Hausa is spoken mainly in northern Nigeria, across states such as Kano, Kaduna, Katsina, Sokoto and Zamfara, and across southern Niger, with speaker communities in Chad, Cameroon, Ghana and other parts of West and Central Africa. It functions as a major regional lingua franca of trade across the Sahel, and is one of Nigeria's three major national languages, used extensively in federal and state broadcasting, including dedicated Hausa services of international broadcasters such as the BBC and Voice of America, taught in schools, and used as a medium of early education in parts of the north. Hausa has a thriving film industry, 'Kannywood', based in Kano. Dialects include Kano, Sokoto, Katsina and Zazzau varieties, with Kano Hausa generally treated as the reference standard for broadcasting and education. Unlike Yorùbá and Igbo, Hausa is a Chadic language within the Afro-Asiatic family rather than Niger-Congo, and its grammar and vocabulary show centuries of contact influence from Arabic due to the historic spread of Islam and trans-Saharan trade. It has a long-standing literary tradition, including Arabic-script religious and praise poetry predating colonial rule.

Hausa today is chiefly written in boko, a Latin-based orthography introduced under British colonial administration in the early twentieth century and now standard in schools, government and media. It uses hooked letters ɓ, ɗ and ƙ to represent implosive and ejective consonants not found in English, and the apostrophe-marked ʼy for a glottalised sound. Before boko, and still used today for religious and some literary writing, Hausa was written in ajami, a modified Arabic script adapted to Hausa's sounds, with a literary history going back centuries, especially in Islamic scholarship and Sufi poetry. Hausa is tonal, with tone and vowel length usually left unmarked in everyday boko writing, though marked in linguistic and pedagogical texts.