Hausa

How Hausa became Niger's official language

Niger declared Hausa its official language in 2025, and French lost that status. Native speakers live mostly in the south of the country, in cities such as Maradi, Zinder, Tahoua, Dosso and Agadez. In Nigeria the language dominates the north outside Kwara, Kogi and Benue, and it is a lingua franca for non-native speakers as far as Benin, Togo, Chad and parts of Sudan. Northern Nigeria's film industry, Kannywood, works in Hausa.

Why Hausa spelling leaves the tones out

Hausa is tonal: each of its five vowels can carry a high or a low tone, or a falling one, and tone separates both words and grammatical categories. Standard spelling marks neither tone nor vowel length. So dàgà, "from", and dáagáa, "battle", are both written daga, and only teaching materials and linguistic work add accents. The glottalic consonants, implosives and ejectives, get letters of their own such as ɓ and ɗ, or an apostrophe.

Which alphabets Hausa uses

The official orthography is boko, a Latin alphabet the British colonial administration introduced in the 1930s. The two countries differ in one letter: Niger writes ƴ where Nigeria writes ʼy.

Ajami, the Arabic-based script, is older. The first known work in Hausa, Riwayar Nabi Musa by Abdullahi Suka, dates from the 17th century. Ajami was never regulated by any authority, so its conventions settled gradually, and writers in Niger and Nigeria follow two traditions drawn from the Quran recitations of Hafs and of Warsh.

Where the dialects lose their tones

The northernmost dialects, Kurhwayanci, Damagaranci and Adaranci, are spoken in the Sahel of west and central Niger. They remain intelligible to other Hausa speakers, but contact with Zarma, Fula and Tuareg has changed some grammar and vocabulary, and they border on non-tonal pitch accent. The same north and south split in tone runs through Songhay, whose northern dialects around Timbuktu and Gao are non-tonal.