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How Hausa packages meaning
Hausa grammar at a glance
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Common questions about Hausa
What is the Hausa preverbal complex?
Hausa fuses person, number, gender, tense, aspect, and mood into a single word before the verb. ina ('I-CONT') = 'I am doing'; yana ('he-CONT') = 'he is doing'; tana ('she-CONT') = 'she is doing'; muka ('we-PFV') = 'we did'. The main verb stays the same. Different aspect/mood gives a different fused word: ya yi (he did) vs yana yi (he's doing) vs zai yi (he will do).
What are Hausa verb grades?
Hausa verbs come in seven grades — productive derivational classes that systematically modify the verb's argument structure and meaning. Grade 1 is basic transitive (sayar 'sell'); grade 2 is partitive/ventive ('buy from'); grade 3 is intransitive; grade 4 has totality/completeness; and so on. Each grade has its own ending pattern. The grade system is unique to Chadic languages and one of Hausa's defining features.
Does Hausa have grammatical gender?
Two genders — masculine and feminine. Most feminine nouns end in -aa: yarinya 'girl', kasuwa 'market'; masculine nouns end in other vowels or consonants: yaro 'boy', gida 'house'. Adjectives, pronouns, and the preverbal complex all agree. The 2nd-person pronoun is gender-marked even in singular: ka 'you (m.)', ki 'you (f.)'. This is unusual for West Africa, where most languages lack gender.
Is Hausa tonal?
Yes — Hausa has two underlying tones (high and low) plus a falling tone that appears in some contexts. Tone interacts with vowel length: each vowel can be short or long, and the four combinations of length × tone give different forms. káːsuwáː (high-long-high) 'market' is a different word from kàsùwà patterns. Tone marks lexical distinctions and some grammatical ones.
Why is Hausa one of the few West African languages with grammatical gender?
Hausa is Chadic, a branch of the Afro-Asiatic family — related to Arabic, Hebrew, and Berber, all of which have grammatical gender. West Africa is otherwise dominated by Niger-Congo languages (Yoruba, Igbo, Akan, Wolof) that lack gender. Hausa kept the gender system inherited from Proto-Afro-Asiatic. As Hausa expanded across the Sahel as a trade language, it carried its gender system into a region where other languages had lost or never had one.
Sources for Hausa
The grammatical descriptions on this page are informed by the following published reference and descriptive grammars. Grammatical facts themselves are not subject to copyright; the scholars who documented them deserve attribution.
- Jaggar, Philip J. (2001). Hausa. London Oriental and African Language Library 7. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins (788 pp.). — Comprehensive descriptive grammar; chapters consulted include 1 (overview), 2 (phonology), 3 (noun classification), 4 (gender/number), 6 (TAM, pp. 148–208), 7 (verb grades, pp. 212–217), 8 (verbal nouns), 9 (NP syntax / numerals), 11 (clause syntax), 12 (focus / questions), 15 (adverbials/prepositions). [via static/grammar-library/hau/jaggar-2001-hausa.pdf]