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Hausa Language
Hausa (; / ; Hausa Ajami, Ajami: ) is a Chadic language spoken primarily by the Hausa people in the northern parts of Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, Benin and Togo, and the southern parts of Niger, and Chad, with significant minorities in Ivory Coast. A small number of speakers also exist in Sudan. Hausa is a member of the Afroasiatic language family and is the most widely spoken language within the Chadic branch of that family. Despite originating from a non-tonal language family, Hausa utilizes differences in pitch to distinguish words and grammar. ''Ethnologue'' estimated that it was spoken as a first language by some 58 million people and as a second language by another 36 million, bringing the total number of Hausa speakers to an estimated 94 million. In Nigeria, the Hausa film industry is known as Kannywood. Classification Hausa belongs to the West Chadic languages subgroup of the Chadic languages group, which in turn is part of the Afroasiatic languages, Afro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
African Reference Alphabet
The African Reference Alphabet is a largely defunct continent-wide guideline for the creation of Latin alphabets for African languages. Two variants of the initial proposal (one in English and a second in French) were made at a 1978 UNESCO-organized conference held in Niamey, Niger. They were based on the results of several earlier conferences on the harmonization of established Latin alphabets of individual languages. The 1978 conference recommended the use of single letters for speech sounds rather than of Digraph (orthography), letter sequences or of letters with diacritics. A substantial overhaul was proposed in 1982 but was rejected in a follow-up conference held in Niamey in 1984. Since then, continent-wide harmonization has been largely abandoned, because regional needs, practices and thus preferences differ greatly across Africa. Through the individual languages that were its basis, the African Reference Alphabet inherits from the Africa Alphabet, and like the latter uses ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
