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| == Overview of the Hausa Language ==
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| The Hausa language is primarily spoken in Nigeria and Niger, although it is also widely used as a lingua franca for communication between speakers of other languages in West Africa. Hausa is a member of the Chadic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family.
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| === The Hausa Alphabet and Hausa Pronunciation ===
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| The Hausa language uses a variation of the Latin alphabet, which is also used by English. English speakers learning Hausa will therefore find that many Hausa letters look familiar, even if they don't always sound the same. However, there are also several letters can be written either as special characters (often called 'hooked consonants', because they appear to have small hooks on them) or as regular consonants with apostrophes. These letters represent glottalic consonants, a type of consonant sound which requires controlling the glottis (the space between the vocal cords) while speaking. This type of sound is not found in English.
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| Hausa is a tonal language, meaning that different tones can change a word's meaning. Language students who are beginning to learn Hausa should pay careful attention to the tones used by native speakers. There are three tones: the low tone, the high tone, and the falling tone.
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| The Hausa language also distinguishes between long and short vowel sounds. In some dictionaries and language references, tones and vowel length may be marked with various diacritics over vowels. However, the diacritic marks are not used in the everyday written form of the language, so the best way to learn Hausa pronunciation is to listen carefully to the way it is spoken by native speakers.
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| === Hausa Vocabulary ===
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| The language that has had the most influence on Hausa vocabulary is Arabic, from which it has borrowed numerous words over centuries of cultural contact. More recently, Hausa has borrowed vocabulary from English and French, particularly in the realm of technology. Usually, these loanwords are adapted to fit the sound system and grammar rules of the Hausa language.
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| === Hausa Grammar ===
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| There are a number of grammar features that English speakers learning to speak Hausa may find interesting. For example, Hausa nouns have gender, meaning that every noun is considered to be either masculine or feminine. Other words in a sentence must agree with the gender of the noun. Adjectives usually come before the nouns they modify, although they can come afterwards in certain constructions. It is also very common to modify nouns with other nouns, especially those representing qualities, instead of using adjectives. The Hausa language has seven tenses plus an imperative mood, but the distinctions between the tenses are usually reflected in the subject pronouns rather than in the verbs themselves. The usual word order in Hausa sentences is Subject-Verb-Object, the same as English.
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