This book is a comprehensive grammar of Hausa, one of the largest and most important languages of Africa. Hausa is spoken by some 35 million people as a first language and approximately 15 million more as a second language. Paul Newman, a world authority on the Hausa language, draws on two centuries of Hausa linguistic scholarship to provide the most authoritative and detailed grammar of the language ever written. Unlike other grammars, this book is organised alphabetically. Readers will appreciate the ease with which they can find the specific individual topics that interest them. The grammar covers such expected topics as tonology, noun plurals, and verbal tense/aspect as well as often neglected topics, including verbal idioms, proper names, and language games. Newman also incorporates historical linguistic notes that explain and explicate current Hausa phenomena, especially puzzling anomalies, in terms of their Chadic and Afroasiatic origins.

This up-to-date volume, the first Hausa-English dictionary published in a quarter of a century, is written with language learners and practical users in mind. With over 10,000 entries, it primarily covers Standard Nigerian Hausa but also includes numerous forms from Niger and other dialect areas of Nigeria. The dictionary includes new Hausa terminology for products, events, and activities of the modern world. Its definitions show the use of Hausa words in context, and particular attention is paid to idioms, figurative meanings, and special usages. As a guide to pronunciation, headwords and illustrative sentences are fully marked for tone and vowel length. The book adopts a unique approach to the presentation of verb forms that clarifies lexical relationships and their correct usage.

Hausa is a major world language, spoken as a mother tongue by more than 30 million people in northern Nigeria and southern parts of Niger, in addition to diaspora communities of traders, Muslim scholars and immigrants in urban areas of West Africa, e.g. southern Nigeria, Ghana, and Togo, and the Blue Nile province of the Sudan. It is also widely spoken as a second language and has expanded rapidly as a lingua franca. Hausa is a member of the Chadic language family which, together with Semitic, Cushitic, Omotic, Berber and Ancient Egyptian, is a coordinate branch of the Afroasiatic phylum. This comprehensive reference grammar consists of sixteen chapters which together provide a detailed and up-to-date description of the core structural properties of the language in theory-neutral terms, thus guaranteeing its on-going accessibility to researchers in linguistic typology and universals.

First published in 1988, this book is a landmark in the study of one of the major African languages: Hausa. Hausa is spoken by 40-50 million people, mostly in northern Nigeria, but also in communities stretching from Senegal to the Red Sea. It is a language taught on an international basis at major universities in Nigeria, the USA, Western and Eastern Europe, the Middle and Far East, and is probably the best studied African language, boasting an impressive list of research publications. As Nigeria grows in importance, so Hausa becomes a language of international standing. The volume brings together contributions from the major contemporary figures in Hausa language studies from around the world. It contains work on the linguistic description of Hausa, various aspects of Hausa literature, both oral and written, and on the description of the relationship of Hausa to other Chadic languages.

Written by the world's leading expert on Hausa, this book provides a lucid and comprehensive linguistic history of the language, highlighting changes in phonology, tonology, morphology, grammar, and lexicon. It is an invaluable resource for specialists in African and Afroasiatic languages, as well as general historical linguists and typologists.