Dictionaries and learning

The standard older dictionary is G. P. Bargery’s A Hausa–English Dictionary and English–Hausa Vocabulary (1934), a huge work with thousands of examples. R. C. Abraham’s Dictionary of the Hausa Language (1962) is shorter and widely used. Paul Newman’s The Hausa Language: An Encyclopedic Reference Grammar (2000) and Philip Jaggar’s Hausa (2001) describe the sounds, grammar and dialects in detail.

For beginners, radio is a good teacher: BBC Hausa, Voice of America and Deutsche Welle broadcast news that is easy to find, and Kannywood films and Hausa songs provide everyday speech. The Dictionary section of this website offers a searchable Hausa–English word list of about 7,000 entries (with French and Spanish glosses), built from a checked lexicon. Spellings follow the source and, like much everyday typing, omit the hooked letters; see the section on the alphabet.