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An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written symbols or graphemes that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllable, for instance, and logographic systems use characters to represent words, morphemes, or other semantic units.
Hausa is a Chadic language spoken by the Hausa people, mainly within the northern half of Nigeria and the southern half of Niger, and with significant minorities in Chad, Benin, and Cameroon.
Kanuri is a dialect continuum spoken by some four million people, as of 1987, in Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon, as well as small minorities in southern Libya and by a diaspora in Sudan.
Yoruba (; Yor.Èdè Yorùbá is a language spoken in West Africa, most prominently Southwestern Nigeria. It is spoken by the ethnic Yoruba people. The number of Yoruba speakers is stated as roughly 50 million, plus about 2 million second-language speakers. As a pluricentric language, it is primarily spoken in a dialectal area spanning Nigeria and Benin with smaller migrated communities in Cote d'Ivoire, Sierra Leone and The Gambia.
Hausa–Fulani are people of mixed Hausa and Fulani origin. They are primarily found in the Northern region of Nigeria, most of whom speak a variant of Hausa or Fula or both as their first language.
The Syriac alphabet is a writing system primarily used to write the Syriac language since the 1st century AD. It is one of the Semitic abjads descending from the Aramaic alphabet through the Palmyrene alphabet, and shares similarities with the Phoenician, Hebrew, Arabic and Sogdian, the precursor and a direct ancestor of the traditional Mongolian scripts.
Ajam is an Arabic word meaning mute, which today refers to someone whose mother tongue is not Arabic. During the Arab conquest of Persia, the term became a racial pejorative. In many languages — including Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Hindi, Kurdish, Gujarati, Malay, Punjabi, and Swahili — Ajam and Ajami refer to Iran and Iranians respectively.
Islam is one of the largest religions in Nigeria, existing within the borders of the country since the 11th century. It is one of the two dominant religions practised in Nigeria, the other being Christianity. Nigeria has the largest Muslim population in West Africa. In 2021, the CIA World Factbook estimated that 53.5% of Nigeria's population is Muslim. In 2007, the BBC estimated that slightly over 50% of the population is Christian. Muslims in Nigeria are predominantly Sunnis of the Maliki school of thought. However, there is a significant Shia minority, primarily in Kaduna, Kano, Katsina, Osun, Ilorin and Sokoto states. In particular, a 2009 Pew Forum survey on religious diversity identified 5% of Nigerian Muslims as Shia.
Fula, also known as Fulani or Fulah, is a Senegambian language spoken by more than 40 million people as a set of various dialects in a continuum that stretches across some 20 countries in West and Central Africa. Along with other related languages such as Serer and Wolof, it belongs to the Atlantic geographic group within Niger–Congo, and more specifically to the Senegambian branch. Unlike most Niger-Congo languages, however, Fula does not have tones.
There are over 525 native languages spoken in Nigeria. The official language of Nigeria is English, the language of former colonial British Nigeria. As reported in 2003, Nigerian English and Nigerian Pidgin were spoken as a second language by 100 million people in Nigeria. Communication in the English language is much more popular in the country's urban communities than it is in the rural areas, due to globalization.
Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Cumaean Greek version of the Greek alphabet used by the Etruscans. Several Latin-script alphabets exist, which differ in graphemes, collation and phonetic values from the classical Latin alphabet.
The Arabic script is a writing system used for writing Arabic and several other languages of Asia and Africa, such as Persian (Farsi/Dari), Uyghur, Kurdish, Punjabi, Sindhi, Balti, Balochi, Pashto, Lurish, Urdu, Kashmiri, Rohingya, Somali and Mandinka, among others. Until the 16th century, it was also used to write some texts in Spanish. Additionally, prior to the language reform in 1928, it was the writing system of Turkish. It is the second-most widely used writing system in the world by the number of countries using it and the third by the number of users, after the Latin and Chinese scripts.
Ajami or Ajamiyya, which comes from the Arabic root for foreign or stranger, is an Arabic script used for writing African languages, particularly those of Hausa and Swahili, although many other African languages are written using the script, including Yoruba, Fulani, and Pulaar. It is considered an Arabic-derived African writing system. Since many African languages include phonetic sounds and systems not found in the standard Arabic language, an adapted Arabic script is used to transcribe those "foreign" sounds. Similar modified Arabic scripts exist in Iran, South Asia, and Southeast Asia.
The writing systems of Africa refer to the current and historical practice of writing systems on the African continent, both indigenous and those introduced.
In sociolinguistics, digraphia refers to the use of more than one writing system for the same language. Synchronic digraphia is the coexistence of two or more writing systems for the same language, while diachronic digraphia is the replacement of one writing system by another for a particular language.
The Hausa are the largest ethnic group in West and Central Africa with the second most spoken language after Arabic in the Afro-Asiatic language family. The Hausa are a diverse but culturally homogeneous people based primarily in the Sahelian and the sparse savanna areas of southern Niger and northern Nigeria respectively, numbering over 80 million people with significant indigenized populations in Benin, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Chad, Sudan, Central African Republic, Republic of the Congo, Togo, Ghana, Eritrea, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Senegal and the Gambia.
The Fula language is written primarily in the Latin script, but in some areas is still written in an older Arabic script called the Ajami script or in the recently invented Adlam script.
Alhaji Garba Shu’aibu Gashuwa is a contemporary Nigerian Hausa poet.
Hausa literature is any work written in the Hausa language. It includes poetry, prose, song, music, and drama within the culture of the Hausa. Hausa literature includes folk literature, and provides a means of recording, preserving, and transmitting knowledge—often in an entertaining fashion—especially in regard to social, psychological, spiritual, or political roles.
References
- ↑ Awoyale, Yiwola; Planet Phrasebooks, Lonely (2007). Africa: Lonely Planet Phrasebook. Lonely Planet. p. 79. ISBN 978-1-74059-692-3.
- ↑ Dalby, Andrew (1998). Dictionary of languages: the definitive reference to more than 400 languages . New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 242. ISBN 0-231-11568-7.
- ↑ omniglot.com
- ↑ maguzawa.dyndns.ws (Hausa-English dictionary)
- ↑ 'Boko Haram' doesn't really mean 'Western education is a sin', The Christian Science Monitor
- ↑ Newman, Paul (2013). "The Etymology of Hausa boko" (PDF). Mega-Chad Research Network / Réseau Méga-Tchad. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-04-27. Retrieved 2014-04-27.
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