HAUSA LANGUAGE

Hausa, which is spoken by some 31 million people, belongs to the Chadic branch of Afro-Asiatic. Outside of Hausaland, communities of {{link=Hausa">Hausa merchants have stimulated the use of Hausa as a lingua franca by tens of millions more across a broad area of the African Sahel and savanna region. Hausa is now customarily written in the Latin alphabet , introduced in the early 20th century, though writing in an adaptation of the Arabic alphabet , attested about a century earlier, continues in Qurʾānic schools and some other contexts.