This page brings together basic information about the Latin script and its use for the Hausa language. It aims to provide a brief, descriptive summary of the modern, printed orthography and typographic features, and to advise how to write Hausa using Unicode.
Hausa has numerous dialects, each of which may pronounce letters differently. The pronunciation in this document is generally based on the phonemic transcriptions provided by Wiktionary, although in some places we describe differences with other dialects, especially Kano, with more phonetic information.
Sample
Select part of this sample text to show a list of characters, with links to more details.
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[Nigeria] Abin nufi ga ilimi shi ne: ya sama wa ɗan-adam jin daɗin rayuwa da ƙarfafa kiyayewa da hakkokinsa da muhimman abubuwan da ʼyancinsa ya ƙunsa. Ya kamata ilimi ya kawo fahimtar juna da ragowa da aminci tsakanin ƙasashe da tsakanin ʼyan-adam, kome launin fatarsu da addinin da suke bi, ya kuma ƙarfafa ƙoƙarin da Majalisar Ɗinkin Duniya take yi domin a sami zaman lafiya da kwanciyar hankali a duniya.
[Niger] ... muhimman abubuwan da ƴancinsa ya ƙunsa. ... tsakanin ƙasashe da tsakanin ƴan‐adam, kome ....
Source: Unicode UDHR for Nigeria and Niger, articles 1 & 2
Usage & history
Origins of the Latin script, 7thC – today.
Phoenician
└ Greek
└ Old Italic
└ Latin
+ Glagolitic
+ Cyrillic
+ Armenian
+ Georgian
+ Coptic
+ Runes
Hausa is normally written in the Latin script, but also (less commonly) using the Arabic ajami script. The modern official orthography is called boko, and was introduced in the 1930s by the British colonial administration.
Harshe Hausaháɽ.ʃè háu.sáHausa language
The centre of the native speaker population is in northern Nigeria and southern Niger, but Hausa is spoken across the width of the Sahel region, and mostly in mutually intelligible form. There are significant minorities in Benin, Cameroon, and Chad, and as a trade language it also reaches into Ghana, Togo, and parts of Sudan. It is estimated that there are 100-150 million speakers.
Orthographic development & variants
This orthography was introduced by the British around the beginning of the 20th century, and aligned with the Pan-Nigerian alphabet in the 1980s.wha
There are or have been a number of variant practices for writing Hausa boko. They include:
alternative representations in Niger and Nigeria for j̰ (see basicconsonants)
The Latin script is an alphabet. This means that it is largely phonetic in nature, where each letter represents a basic sound. See the table to the right for a brief overview of features for the modern Hausa orthography using the Latin script.
There is one systematic difference between the orthographies used in Niger and Nigeria (see basicconsonants), but difficulties in accommodating non-ASCII characters give rise to a number of variant representations. See variants.
Hausa text runs left-to-right in horizontal lines. Words are separated by spaces. The orthography is bicameral. The visual forms of letters don't usually interact.
Hausa has 21 consonant letters (42 counting uppercase), one of which can be written in two different ways. A number of sounds are written using digraphs.
Hausa has 10 vowel letters (20 including uppercase). Diphthongs are written using digraphs.
Long and short vowel sounds are distinctive phonetically, but are not reflected in the orthography.
The following represents the repertoire of the Hausa language.
Click on the sounds to reveal locations in this document where they are mentioned.
Phones in a lighter colour are non-native or allophones. Source Wikipedia.
Vowel sounds
Plain vowels
Diphthongs
Consonant sounds
labial
alveolar
post-
alveolar
retroflex
palatal
velar
glottal
stop
pb ɓ
td ɗ
cɟ cʼ
kɡ kʷɡʷ kʲgʲ kʼkʷʼkʲʼ
ʔ
affricate
t͡sʼ
t͡ʃd͡ʒ
fricative
f fʲ
sz
ʃʒ
h
nasal
m
n
approximant
w
l
j j̰
trill/flap
ɾ
ɽ
j̰ is a semi-vowel approximant with creaky voice (laryngealisation). It is not used in many words, but many of those words are very common, such as
ƴaƴa
Tone
Hausa uses 3 tones, high, low and falling. They are not indicated in normal textc, eg.
ruwa
fure
kunne
Structure
Hausa has 3 syllable types: CV, CVV, and CVC, where VV can be a long vowel or a diphthong.c The long vs. short vowel distinction is phonemically important, however when a syllable with a long vowel acquires and final consonant, the vowel is shortened.
Consonant clusters may occur where syllables are side by side, but not within a syllable. Gemination is, however, a distinctive feature.c
Labialisation ʷ and palatalisation ʲ may occur after an initial plosive consonant.
Vowels
Here is the set of characters described in this section. There are only letters, no combining marks.
A␣E␣I␣O␣U␣a␣e␣i␣o␣ú␣̀␣̂
Vowels after consonants
Plain vowels
5 vowel letters are used, each with an upper and lower case form.
i␣u␣e␣o␣aI␣U␣E␣O␣A
Although long and short vowel sounds are phonemically distinctive, Hausa doesn't distinguish between them in writing, eg.
uƙuba
There was an attempt at one point to introduce vowel doubling to indicate long vowels in Niger, but that was dropped.
Diphthongs
Hausa is usually described as having the following 4 diphthongs. These are sequences of vowel sounds that are not separated by a glottal stop.
iu␣ui␣ai␣au
Examples:
laimahausa
Vowel length
Long and short vowel sounds are distinctive phonetically, but are not reflected in the orthography.
Standalone vowels
Standalone vowels are written using ordinary vowel letters and no special arrangements.
abacada
Tones
Tone is not indicated in normal textc, eg.
ruwafurekunne
However, in academic and education text the tone can be indicated using one of the following characters, representing high, low, and falling, respectively.
́␣̀␣̂
Vowel sounds to characters
This section maps Hausa vowel sounds to common graphemes in the Latin orthography. Click on a grapheme to find other mentions on this page (links appear at the bottom of the page). Click on the character name to see examples and for detailed descriptions of the character(s) shown.
The letter r represents 2 different sounds: ɾ and ɽ. In academic or educational texts the former is sometimes distinguished using r̃U+0072 SMALL LETTER R + U+0303 COMBINING TILDE.
Digraphs
A number of the consonant sounds in Hausa are written using multiple letters.
ts␣kw␣ky␣ƙw␣sh␣ʼy
The last digraph in the list above is included here because it is the standard way to write that sound in Nigeria (as opposed to the form in the previous section which is used in Niger). Other implosives and ejectives may also be written as digraphs (see ejectives).
Allophonic pronunciations
A number of sounds are pronounced differently, according to the dialect. This section highlights a few differences for velar consonants by contrasting the standard phonemic representation with the standard pronunciation in the Kano dialect.
Contexts
phonemic
Kano
example
Kano
ki ke
k
c
baki
bàː.cíː
ku ko
k
kʷ
kurma
kʷʊ́ɽ.máː
ƙi ƙe
kʼ
cʼ
baƙi
bə́.cʼíː
ƙu ƙo
kʼ
kʷʼ
ƙugiya
kʷʼúː.ɟɪ̀.jáː
gi ge
g
ɟ
kogi
kʷòː.ɟíː
gu go
g
ɡʷ
mugu
múː.ɡʷùː
Ejectives & implosives
Ejectives and implosives can be represented using special characters, but may also be represented by a combination of apostrophe and the basic characterwha, or often just by the basic character itself. For example, ɗaya might be also written dʼaya or simply daya
Wikipedia uses the special character forms, but the BBC, CRI, and VOA Hausa pages just use ordinary characters for the ejectives.
The following table lists some single characters that may be written using a normal letter and apostrophe. Note how the order of the character and apostrophe is reversed in the final example.
Single letter
Digraph
example
alt. form
ɓ
bʼ
raɓa
rabʼa
ɗ
dʼ
ɗaya
dʼaya
ƙ
kʼ
ƙashi
kʼashi
ƴ
ʼy
ƴa
ʼya
The digraph ts represents an ejective sound without the use of a special character or apostrophe. The associated sound can be either sʼor t͡sʼ.
Apostrophe
On its own, the apostrophe represents a glottal stop, eg. jamaʼa It is not written in initial position to represent a glottal stop.
It is also used in some cases to spell certain sounds as described in ejectives.
This section maps Hausa consonant sounds to common graphemes in the Latin orthography. Click on a grapheme to find other mentions on this page (links appear at the bottom of the page). Click on the character name to see examples and for detailed descriptions of the character(s) shown.
Sounds listed as 'infrequent' are allophones, or sounds used for foreign words, etc.
p
p only used in a few transliterated words.
parmi
b
b
baba
B
ɓ
ɓ
ɓarawo
May sometimes be spelled bʼ.
Ɓ
t
t
teku
T
t͡sʼ
ts
tsuntsu
TS
t͡ʃ
c
cokali
C
d
d
dahir
D
d͡ʒ
j
jini
J
ɗ
ɗ
ɗaya
May sometimes be spelled dʼ.
Ɗ
c
ky
kyanwa
k
k
kamala
K
kʼ
ƙ
ƙarami
May sometimes be spelled kʼ.
Ƙ
kʷ
kw
kwaɗo
kʷʼ
ƙw
ƙwai
kʲʼ
ƙy
ɡ
g
ganye
G
ɡʷ
gw
agwagwa
ɡʲ
gy
ʔ
ʼ
jamaʼa
f~ɸ
f
fari
F
s
s
siket
S
sʼ
tsʼ (May be pronounced t͡sʼ in some dialects.)
tsuntsu
z
z
zomo
Z
ʃ
sh
shekara
SH
ʒ
j (May be pronounced d͡ʒ in some dialects.)
jini
J
h
h
hausa
H
m
m
mutum
M
n
n
nono
N
w
w
wuta
W
r~ɾ
r
kore
R
ɽ
r
ruwa
R
l
l
laima
L
j
y
yayyafi
Y
ʔʲ/j̰
ƴ in Niger.
ƴaƴa
ʼy in Nigeria.
ʼyaʼya
Ƴ
Numbers, dates, currency, etc
European digits are used.
Text direction
Hausa boko text runs left to right in horizontal lines.
Hausa is bicameral, and applications may need to enable transforms to allow the user to switch between cases.
Typographic units
Word boundaries
Words are separated by spaces.
Words can also be hyphenated. This is especially, but not solely, true for words that repeat the same sound, eg.
wuƙi-wuƙi
dushi-dushi
atone-janar
Graphemes
tbd
Punctuation & inline features
Phrase & section boundaries
,␣;␣:␣.␣?␣!
Hausa uses ASCII punctuation.
phrase
,
;
:
sentence
.
?
!
Bracketed text
(␣)
Hausa commonly uses ASCII parentheses to insert parenthetical information into text.
start
end
standard
(
)
Quotations & citations
“␣”␣‘␣’
Hausa texts may use quotation marks around quotations. Of course, due to keyboard design, quotations may also be surrounded by ASCII double and single quote marks.
