This online grammar provides basic information about the structure of the Hausa language explained in a relatively non-technical way.
Click on the highlighted Grammar Topics to the left. This grammar is work in progress. Only the highlighted topics have content and not all are complete. Please return for updates.
For for further sources of information on Hausa click the link to the Hausa Home page topic index at the top of the frame to the left.
For comments, suggestions, questions, and constructive criticism, please e-mail schuh@humnet.ucla.edu.
Designer's comment: Probably too "non-technical" for the taste of Hausa speciliasts and professional linguists. The primary intended audience is beginners in Hausa and people (linguists and others) who want some basic information about Hausa without having to wade through dense prose descriptions and details, as important as they might be. I have occasionally included links to "Technical notes" on details which a learner could probably get along without knowing but which, nonetheless, fill important gaps in the basic description.
The medium of the World Wide Web forces choices that are not optimal for language description. In particular, I do not mark tone and vowel length for the most part. The web environment still does not provide a convenient way to display non-standard characters. About the only way this can be done without placing the burden on users to install special software on their individual computers is to create examples containing special characters as graphic objects. Inclusion of all the necessary graphic objects not only causes web pages to load much slower than pure html files, but creation of all those objects is exceedingly time consuming and tedious. The latter consideration is the main reason for my choosing to prepare the grammar, at least initially, without marking tone and vowel length for the most part. One can also rationalize this decision by noting that the standard Hausa orthography does not mark these distinctions, and moreover, in my experience, marking tone and vowel length is only a minimal aid in getting the average Hausa student to actually learn to produce these features of the language with any accuracy!