Hausa greetings can last longer than the conversations they introduce. You ask how the other person slept, how the family is, how the work is going and whether they're tired, they ask you the same, and only then does anyone get to the point. If you want to learn Hausa, start right there. The greetings are your first real conversation, and they teach you the sounds, the rhythm and the manners at once.
After the greetings, the work has three parts. Vocabulary comes faster than you'd expect, because Hausa has borrowed freely from Arabic and English. The grammar has one trick worth learning early: tense lives in the pronoun, not in the verb. And the tones matter in speech but don't appear in ordinary writing, so you learn them by ear. Half an hour a day gets you through the greetings in a week and into simple sentences within a month.
Where Hausa is spoken
Hausa is the main language of northern Nigeria, in cities like Kano, Kaduna, Katsina, Sokoto and Zaria, and of southern Niger, around Maradi and Zinder. There are long-established Hausa-speaking communities in Ghana, Cameroon, Chad and Benin too. Across much of West Africa it also works as a language of trade. It's the first language of tens of millions of people and a second language for tens of millions more. Standard Hausa is based on the speech of Kano.
If your work takes you to Lagos or the southwest of Nigeria, the language around you will be Yoruba, not Hausa. They aren't related, and one won't help you with the other.
Family, alphabet and the tones you can't see
Hausa belongs to the Chadic branch of the Afroasiatic family, which makes it a distant relative of Arabic, Hebrew and Amharic. You won't notice that at beginner level. The Arabic you will notice comes from loanwords, such as littafi (book), and from much of the vocabulary of religion.
It's written in the Latin alphabet, known as boko, with a few extra letters: ɓ, ɗ, ƙ and ʼy. For ɓ and ɗ you pull air slightly inward as you make the sound; ƙ is a "k" with a sharp pop. An apostrophe marks a catch in the throat, as in a'a, "no". An older Arabic-based script, ajami, is still in use too, mostly in religious and traditional writing.
Hausa has high, low and falling tones, and its vowels can be short or long. Neither tone nor length is marked in everyday writing; only dictionaries and textbooks show them. Two words that look identical on the page can differ only in their melody, so whenever you can, learn a new word from a person, a film or the radio, not only from the page.
How to learn Hausa grammar, easy part first
The pleasant surprise is how little the verb does. Tense and aspect sit in the small word before it:
- Na zo. "I came."
- Ina zuwa. "I'm coming."
- Zan zo. "I'll come."
Learn those three patterns with a dozen common verbs and you can already say a great deal.
The less pleasant parts: Hausa has grammatical gender, masculine and feminine, and it shows in pronouns as well as nouns. Yaro is "boy" and yarinya is "girl", and "you" is kai to a man but ke to a woman. Plurals are famously irregular: yaro becomes yara, mota (car) becomes motoci, and littafi becomes littattafai. There's no single rule worth memorizing at this stage. Learn every noun with its plural, as a pair.
