Hausa is the only one of the languages ββof the Chadian family (there are more than 140 of them), which has written language, and the largest in the number of speakers. The total number of speakers is over 60 million. He is native to the Haus tribe, who live mainly in Nigeria and Niger. But they also speak it in countries such as Chad, Cameroon, Benin, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Togo, Sudan and others. In Nigeria, Niger, and Ghana, the house has officially recognized status as one of the dialects of national minorities.
Place in the international classification
The Hausa language belongs to the West Chadian group, which is part of the Afrasian (formerly called Semitic-Hamitic) macro-family. Some researchers share the Hausa group, which includes two languages: Gwandara and Hausa.
Within this dialect there are more than ten dialects. They are divided into two large groups: eastern and northwestern.
The standard version of the house adopted in Nigeria is based on the Kano coin. The Nigerian city of Kano is a major commercial and cultural center. Koyne is a variant of the spoken language that occurs when communicating between speakers of different dialects.
Interesting Facts
The modern house script used in the media and education is called Boko and is based on the Latin alphabet. It was developed in the 19th century during British colonization.
A noteworthy fact: the word "boko" on Hausa can mean not only a writing system, but also the formation of a Western model. The traditional interpretation of etymology: from the English book - "book". But in 2013, the American specialist in African languages, Paul Newman, in his publication on the etymology of Boko (The Ethymology of Hausa Boko) proved that the word is not a borrowing, and its original meaning is "fake, fraud", more broadly - "any non-Islamic texts. "
There is a slight difference in Latin usage in Niger and Nigeria. To denote the same sound, they use the letter Ζ΄ and 'y, respectively.
In parallel with the Latin alphabet, there is a writing system based on the Arabic alphabet - ajam, or ajami. There are no uniform rules for it. The earliest examples of the use of Ajami for the Hausa language date back to the 17th century - these are examples of religious Islamic poetry. And today, the main field of application of this writing system is literature related to Islam.
And one more interesting fact. In addition, in Nigeria for the house developed another writing technique - Braille.
Phonetic system
According to data provided by the University of California, Los Angeles, there are 23 or 25 consonants in a house language, depending on the speaker.
There are only fourteen vowels. Of these, five are the main ones, which vary in length (short and long), and four diphthongs.
In addition, Hausa is a tone language. There are only three tones: high, low and falling. They are not indicated on the letter, although exceptions can be found in didactic literature.
There are also three types of syllables:
- consonant + vowel;
- consonant + vowel + vowel;
- consonant + vowel + consonant.
There are no consonant clusters (combinations of several consonants in a row).
A few words about grammar and morphology
The word order in a sentence constructed according to house rules is: SVO (subject-predicate-object).
Nouns have categories of gender (female and male) and numbers (singular and plural).
Adjectives are consistent with nouns by gender or number, can be located both before and after it. However, they are rarely used - the qualities of an object are usually expressed using nouns.
For verbs there is a category of the species (perfect and imperfect), but there is no time. The period to which the utterance relates is conveyed using special service words or the general context of the utterance. The main methods of word formation are prefixal and suffixal.
Use in popular culture
In Nigeria, a number of printed materials are being published at Hausa. According to the Nigerian website massmediang.com, for 2018 in the northern regions of Nigeria, this language is the most popular in the media. It also hosts a number of television shows and BBC broadcasts. The Wikipedia section on the house contains more than three thousand articles.
On YouTube, there is a channel with films on the house - Hausa movies TV, it has more than 60 thousand subscribers. These are mainly native speakers of the Hausa language. English subtitles are available for some videos - many people in the country speak English ..