Abstract
Hausa (Chadic/Afroasiatic) is a major (west) African language with more than 30 million first-language speakers, mainly in northern Nigeria and southern Niger. Its lexicon includes many loanwords from Arabic, English, and French. It has laryngealized implosives and glottalized ejectives, has extensive palatalization of coronal stops before front vowels, and is tonal. Hausa has grammatical (masculine/feminine) gender, and noun pluralization is complex. Reduplication is widespread, and descriptive sound-symbolic ‘ideophones’ are a key part of the lexicon. Modifications of verbal semantics and valency are signaled by derivational extensions (‘Grades’), and tam distinctions are marked on a preverbal infl element. It is a pro-drop language (subject and object), and wh- and focus operations typically entail movement.
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