Language

LANGUAGE The Hausa language is, perhaps, the most important of the many languages of West Africa—certainly the most important in Northern Nigeria. It is spoken as their mother tongue by over 31 million people in the 14 Hausa States (enclosed between the Niger, the Benue and the southern edge of the Sahara), but it extends far beyond these limits. The late Robert Needham Cust expressed the opinion that "it has a great extra-territorial ex pansion, and from various causes, especially the dispersion of Hausa slaves among other tribes"—to which might have been added, the frequent journeys of Hausa traders back and forth across the Sahara—"it has obtained the rank of a Lingua Franca, and it is the general vehicle of communication between tribes speaking different languages." Affinities and Structure.—The languages of Africa fall into three distinct families, now, by general agreement, called the Sudanic, Bantu and Hamitic. To the first belong such as Twi, Ewe, Yoruba, the Shilluk of the Upper Nile, the Luo ("Kaviron do") of Kenya Colony, and many others, which have no gram matical inflections, contain chiefly words of one syllable and make great use of tone, pitch, or "musical intonation" to distinguish words otherwise alike in sound, but different in meaning, while there is little or no stress accent. The Bantu family (q.v.) has a somewhat elaborate grammatical structure; stress accent is very marked, but most of the languages also possess tone. The Hamitic languages, which include Hausa, Berber, Somali, Galla and several others, as well as Ancient Egyptian, are classed as In flected and share with the other two great families (the Indo-European and Semitic) the possession of grammatical gender, or the distinction of masculine and feminine indicated by the form of a word, as in our pronouns "he" and "she," or terminations like -ess as in "lion-ess." (It is curious that this feature is absent from all known languages outside the three great families mentioned above, sex being indicated, where necessary, by using a different word, as we do, e.g., in the case of "bull" and "cow," or by adding the word for "man" and "woman," saying, for instance, "man-lion" and "woman lion.") The plural, as a rule, is indicated either by a termination ("suffix") or a change of vowel in the body of the word, com parable to our "man, men," "mouse, mice." More than one plural is used (in Hausa at least two of these are recognized) : one to indicate several individuals of a species, another to express multi tude (sometimes called a "collective plural") and one enumerating several kinds of the same object. There is no article, definite or indefinite, in the Bantu languages (one or two exceptions seem to arise from European influence) . Hausa agrees with them in this respect, though some other Hamitic tongues do not. Another point of resemblance is the position of the genitive; both Hamitic and Bantu place the thing possessed before the possessor, whereas the more typical Sudanic languages reverse this arrangement and say, e.g., "the king's horse" (or rather, literally, "king horse," there being no possessive inflection). In Hausa this would be doki-n sarki horse of (the) king" and in Swahili (to take a specimen Bantu language) it would be farasi ("horse") wa ("of") m f alme ("king") . As already implied, Hausa possesses the mas culine and feminine genders which (there being no neuter) are applied to things without life as well as to persons. The pronoun "he" is in Hausa shi, "she" is ita; there are other forms used with different tenses of the verb. Masculine and feminine nouns are distinguished from each other by their terminations, and ad jectives have to agree with them.

Phonology.

The sounds of Hausa have only in recent years been studied with any approach to accurate analysis, and the last word has not been said on the subject. They should not in themselves prove difficult, provided sufficient attention is paid to such hints as those given by Capt. F. W. Taylor in his Hausa Grammar; e.g., "When learning Hausa colloquially it is of the greatest importance to watch a native's mouth. Generally speak ing, he has a wide mouth and often articulates with the corners drawn well back and all the front teeth showing. . . . Apparently (the tongue) is larger and less mobile, and appears to be used more en bloc and in a more frontal position than is the case with the average Englishman." A very important point, as regards pronunciation of the Hausa language, is the existence of tones, a feature absent from other Hamitic languages, and indicating the fact that the Hausa peo ple, though Hamitic by language, are not so by race. Their language must have been brought to them by immigrants from the north—perhaps at the time when the Batutsi entered Ruanda and ancestors of the present royal family came into Uganda. (But in these last instances, the immigrants acquired the Bantu language of the country.) Tones are found in many, if • not most of the Bantu languages, and are an essential characteristic of the Sudanic, where many words, otherwise similar, can only be distinguished in this way; so essential that the originally Sudanic-speaking Hausa imported it into their acquired tongue. "Hausa," says Capt. Taylor, "occupies a position midway be tween the tone languages, such as Yoruba, and the stress lan guages, such as English, for, though the tones of the Hausa nouns are almost constant, the verb undergoes so many changes that it has in many cases discarded a pitch accent and acquired a stress accent." Literature.—Hausa is written by the natives in the Arabic character (here called Ajami) with certain distinctive peculiari ties which prevent its being easily read by anyone familiar with Arabic script only. There exist large numbers of Ajami mss., though only a few have appeared in print. Some poems of a reli gious character, collected by the late Canon Charles Robinson, were published by the Cambridge University Press in 1902, and the two volumes of Hausa tales edited and translated by Capt. R. Sutherland Rattray contain, both the Hausa text in Roman trans literation, and the original Ajami in facsimile. The language was systematically studied by William Balfour Baikie, the British consul at Loko ja, on the Niger, from 1857 to 1864; by the mis sionary, James Frederick Schon (died 1889), whose first attempt at a grammar was published in 1843 (he afterwards produced a fuller grammar and a dictionary which is still valuable) ; and the great traveller, Heinrich Barth (1821-65). Schon wrote down, from the dictation of two native youths, the narrative of their life and travels, and a number of folk-tales, which have been published under the title of Magana Hausa. Mention should also be made of Maj. Edgar's Litafi na tatsuniyoyi na Hausa—three volumes of Hausa stories. Others have collected proverbs, of which, as in most African languages, there is a great variety, usually shrewd and racy, and of great value, as throwing light on native ways of thought. The requirements of native educa tion have already necessitated the e of several reaclera and other school books, and the whole of the Bible has been translated into Hausa.

It may be of interest to give a few proverbs as specimens of the language: Rashin farm wata, tamraro ke haske.

"When the moon is not full, the stars are bright." Kdzd mai-yaya ita lee tsoro shirwa.

"It is the hen with chickens that fears the hawk." Idan mugun mutun yd shibka zanba, kai ka sa lauje ka yanke.

"If a bad man has sown evil, do you set your sickle to it and cut it down." Alla ba Ka da keta, gonar maye rue Kakwaeyi.

"Allah, Thou hast no evil, Thou sendest rain (even) on the wizard's garden." BIBLIOGRAPHY.--Migeod, The Languages of West Africa, vol. i. Bibliography.--Migeod, The Languages of West Africa, vol. i. (191I, bibl.) ; Meinhof, Die Sprachen der Hamiten (1912, bibl.) ; Rattray, Hausa Folk-Lore (1913) ; Taylor, Hausa Grammar (1923) ; Robinson, Hausa Grammar (5th ed., 1925) ; Fulani-Hausa Readings in the Native Scripts, with Transliterations and Translations (1929) .

(A. WE.)