This chapter gives a sample list of more than twenty Hausa lexical retentions from Proto-Chadic and a comparable list of basic Hausa words without cognates in sister Chadic languages. Also included is a discussion of interesting individual etymologies including boko ‘Western practices’, kasuwa ‘market’, laba ‘pound (weight)’, and zuciya ‘heart’.

Hausa’s rich morphology employs prefixes, infixes, and suffixes, the latter with fixed tone melodies. Reduplication is very common. ‘Feminatives’ were created by adding a feminine suffix to words that were already feminine. Plural formation reflects consonant changes such as Klingenheben’s Law and the loss of final nasals. An ongoing drift has been the change of plural nouns into singulars. Similarly one has ‘frozen pluractionals’, i.e., erstwhile pluractionals without simple counterparts. The elaborate ‘grade system’ developed from basic verbs ending in /a/ or /i/ plus synchronically semantically empty CV suffixes and/or an adverb-like extensions such as totality and ventive. Different grades serve as transitivizers and intransitivizers. The ‘efferential’ grade manifests two originally distinct extensions, *-asi and *-da. Singular ethnonyms come from language names, the initial ba- being a reflex of the word ‘mouth’. The plural counterpart with -awa derives from a formative indicating ‘community’. Derivatives indicating agentive, locational, and instrumental are described including ‘pseudo-agentives’, i.e., words with agentive form but without agentive meaning.

This final chapter summarizes the substantive findings spelled out in the book. These involved historical changes in phonology, including major sound laws and the appearance and disappearance of two new diphthongs, morphology, primarily involving gender, plurality in nouns and pluractionality in verbs, and the origin of the verb grade system, and syntax, focusing on significant tenses, e.g. the falling together of the aorist and the subjunctive, and in the total revamping of the indirect object system. It ends by raising unanswered questions, such as: did Old Hausa have two fully functional contrastive Rs?; could reflexives originally have been built on the word for ‘body’ rather than ‘head’?; how did the current Completive TAM pronoun paradigm come to be used as subjects?; what accounts for the large number of body part terms that begin with /ha/?; and if the current efferential grade incorporates two distinct and unrelated suffixes, what would their original difference in meaning and function have been?

The chapter begins with an overview of current Hausa phonology. It then provides a picture of what existed in ‘Old Hausa’ and the subsequent changes that took place, many due to regular sound laws such as Klingenheben’s Law, the Law of Codas in Reduplication, loss of word-final nasals, and the change of non-initial /r/ into /y/. Although sporadic, historical metathesis was much more common than one usually finds in diachronic change. Glottal stop and /h/ are newly introduced phonemes, resulting from the addition of onsets to vowel-initial words. The high frequency glottalized semivowel /’y/ is also a new phoneme resulting from the fusion of /?/ + /y/. Gemination was originally absent but appeared later and became common through phonological and morphological means. Vowels developed from a skewed 2-3-5 (initial-medial-final) system, with vowel length only distinctive medially, into a system with five vowels, all of which now occur long and short. Starting with two level tones, Hausa later developed Falling and Rising contours, the latter having simplified to High. The loss of vowels resulted in the existence of lexical floating tones not underlyingly attached to segments.

This chapter provides demographic information on the number of Hausa speakers and their geographical distribution. The geographic core of traditional ‘Hausaland’ is the area encompassing Zaria, Kano, and Katsina. Hausa is classified as a Chadic language belonging to the West-A branch. It constitutes a group by itself along with a Creolized offshoot called Gwandara. Hausa employs two writing systems dating from the beginning of the twentieth century, one using the Latin alphabet (called boko), the other using the Arabic alphabet (called ajami). Hausa linguistic scholarship over the past century and a half is outlined, including that of Hausa-speaking linguists in Nigeria and Niger in recent times. This work has been mostly descriptive. The foundation for the historical study of Hausa is a classic paper published a century ago by August Klingenheben.

Hausa retains the widespread Chadic three-term system of masculine singular, feminine singular, and plural (gender neutral). This is reflected in nominal forms and in agreement patterns. With a few grammatical morphemes, e.g. the Linker (na/ta/na) the masculine singular and the plural share the same marker. Tense–Aspect–Mood (TAM) is generally indicated by an overt marker after the subject pronoun and before the verb. The finaln in the Completive paradigm is not a TAM marker as often said, but rather a plural formative. The marker in the Subjunctive is zero. This form historically also indicated the Aorist, which still occurs but in the negative only. The causative is and was formed syntactically using a main verb sâa ‘to cause’ (lit. ‘to put’) and not by means of a morphological extension on the verb. Indirect objects have changed significantly from Old Hausa, in word order, in the form of the marker(s), and in the specific pronouns used. Verbs in the grade system vary in their pre-indirect object usage. Reflexives are built on the noun ‘head’, the question being whether they originally might have employed ‘body’ instead, which is now found in reciprocals.

The Hausa lexicon has been inundated by loanwords, primarily from Arabic and English but also from Kanuri, Tuareg, Fulani and, more recently, Yoruba. Gender assignment has been based both on phonological patterning, mainly the association of final /a/ with feminine gender, and on semantic patterning with prior words. Phonology has been modified primarily by greater incidence and usage of glottal stop and /h/, increased incidence of the rolled R, introduction of numerous word-final consonants, retention of /e/ and /o/ in closed syllables, the incorporation of new nouns with short final vowels, and the introduction of nouns with a final Low-Low tone pattern.