Latin, Hausa

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 ʔʲ / j̰ (see basicC)
• vowel doubling (see vlength)
• use of ordinary ASCII characters rather than the special forms for implosives and ejectives (see ejectives)
• use of various punctuation characters to represent the apostrophe for the glottal stop and ejective consonants (see apostrophe)
• academic and educational texts may add diacritics to indicate tone, and distinguish between the two r phonemes (see tones and basicC)

Letters

Combining marks

Punctuation

Vowel sounds

Consonant sounds

	labial	alveolar	post- alveolar	retroflex	palatal	velar	ejective	glottal
stop	p b ɓ	t d ɗ				k ɡ kʷ ɡʷ kʲ gʲ	kʼ kʷʼ kʲʼ	ʔ ʔʲ
affricate		t͡sʼ	t͡ʃ d͡ʒ t͡ʃʼ
fricative	ɸ f	s z sʼ	ʃ					h
nasal	m	n				ŋ
approximant	w	l			j
trill/flap		ɾ		ɽ

The phoneme t͡sʼ occurs in Kano dialect, but in some other dialects this becomes sʼ.

Some non-Kano dialects also have the ejective t͡ʃʼ.

ʔʲ is a palatalised glottal stop. (Some sources describe this as a semi-vowel approximant with creaky voice (laryngealisation) and transcribe it as j̰.) It is not used in many words, but many of those words are very common, such as ʔʲaʔʲa children.

The only contrastive nasals are m and n, but ŋ also occurs allophonically.

The sounds f and p are allophones of ɸ, and other dialects have hʷ.

Tone

Hausa is a tonal language. Each of its five vowels may have low tone, high tone or falling tone.whl The high tone is typically unmarked in transcription.

Structure

Hausa has 3 syllable types: CV, CVV, and CVC, where VV can be a long vowel or a diphthong.bc 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.bc

Semivowels ʷ and ʲ may occur after an initial consonant. The full range of plain, palatalised, and labialised velars (eg. k, kʲ, or kʷ) only occur contrastively before the vowel a. Before front vowels (eg. i), only palatalised and labialised velars occur. Before rounded vowels, only labialised velars occur.whl

Post-consonant vowels

5 vowel letters are used, each with an upper and lower case form. No distinction is made between long and short vowel sounds.

Standalone vowels

All Hausa vowels are preceded by a consonant. In the case of vowels we refer to here as 'standalone', that consonant is a glottal stop.

Word-initial standalone vowels are written using just a vowel letter and no indication of the glottal stop.

abacada

Word-medial standalone vowels indicate the glottal stop using ʼ.

saʼa

Tones

Tone is not indicated in normal textc.

ruwa fure kunne

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

The right column shows letters used in loan words and foreign pronunciations (especially Arabic), but not usually used for native Fula text.

Basic consonants

The following panel covers the basic set of consonant phonemes used for Hausa.

Click on each letter for more details and for examples of usage, especially where more than one sound is indicated. For a list of unique characters, click on #.

Hausa has 2 implosives, ɓ and ɗ, written using ɓ and ɗ, respectively.

It also has 2 ejectives, t͡sʼ and kʼ, written using ts and ƙ, respectively. Note that ƙ is an ejective, rather than an implosive, like ɓ and ɗ.

ƴ is used in Niger, and ʼy is used in Nigeria.

The letter r represents 2 different sounds: ɾ and ɽ. In academic or educational texts the former is sometimes distinguished using r̃ U+0072 SMALL LETTER R + U+0303 COMBINING TILDE.

Digraphs

A number of the consonant sounds in Hausa are written using multiple letters.

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.

Alternative spellings

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.

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, ʼ represents a glottal stop.

jamaʼa

It is not written in word-initial position, even though a glottal stop sound is present.

It is also used in some cases to spell certain sounds as described in ejectives.

The apostrophe shown here is ʼ, but the BBC, CRI, and Wikipedia texts use ' U+0027 APOSTROPHE instead. Sometimes texts (including VOA) use ’ U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK.

Consonant sounds to characters

Transforming characters

Hausa is bicameral, and applications may need to enable transforms to allow the user to switch between cases.

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.

wuƙi-wuƙi

dushi-dushi

atone-janar

Graphemes

tbd

Phrase & section boundaries

Hausa uses ASCII punctuation.

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.

Line breaking & hyphenation

Lines are generally broken between words.

Show (default) line-breaking properties for characters in the Hausa boko orthography described here.

Baselines, line height, etc.

tbd

Hausa uses the 'alphabetic' baseline.