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Neologisms in Hausa: A Sociological Approach1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2012

A. H. M. Kirk-Greene
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Extract

Hausa is probably the most widely spoken language in Negro Africa. Besides being generally spoken throughout Northern Nigeria, its motherland, Hausa is, as Westermann and Bryan note, widely understood in other West African countries. They cite colonies of Hausa-speakers in Dahomey, Togo, Ghana, Cameroons, Chad, and ‘many of the greater centres in North Africa’. They could also usefully have mentioned the Sudan, where pilgrims from Northern Nigeria have settled in their tens of thousands. Indeed, it is often said that you will find Hausa-speakers from Dakar to Port Sudan, from Leopoldville to Fez. The explorer Heinrich Barth in the 1840's had his first Hausa lesson in Tunis, and fifty years later it was to Tripoli that Bishop Tugwell of the Church Missionary Society and his pioneer team of five went to study Hausa before undertaking their bold missionary thrust into the emirates. Westermann and Bryan point out that the total number of Hausa-speakers cannot be estimated in view of the enormous distribution of the Hausa and the great number of those who speak Hausa as their second language. Few of us would disagree with Cust's judgement that Hausa ‘has obtained the rank of a lingua franca and is the general vehicle of communication between the peoples speaking different languages’. Counting those who have recourse to Hausa as their second or vehicular language, it would be no exaggeration to claim that some 20 million persons ‘hear’ Hausa, as the West African languages so picturesquely express it.

Résumé

LES NÉOLOGISMES HAOUSSA: APPROCHE SOCIOLOGIQUE

Le vocabulaire haoussa s'est augmenté pendant les vingt dernières années d'une terminologie technique, de termes parlementaires et législatifs et d'argot. L'expression de ces termes en haoussa se fait soit par des mots empruntés à l'arabe classique ou par l'assimilation du mot étranger ou par une paraphrase de mots haoussa. L'argot haoussa s'est développé à partir de termes relatifs au vêtement, au cinéma et à la radio, à l'alcool, à la sexualité, à l'école et à l'université. La formation des néologismes est déterminée par des influences sociologiques: 1. Vocabulaire international du vingtième siècle. 2. ‘Malamanci’, le jargon de la nouvelle élite, surtout des cadres administratifs et politiques. 3. ‘Karen motanci’, le parler argotique de la jeunesse urbaine, des jeunes conducteurs des voitures rapides et des mécanitiens. 4. ‘Gaskiyanci’, du journal vernaculaire ‘Gaskiya’ publié en langue haoussa dans le Nigéria du nord, et ‘bibisiyanci’, du B.B.C. 5. Le code moderne des initiales où le mot prend la forme des initiales de la locution étranger et non celles de l'expression haoussa. 6. L'héritage colonial dans le domaine du lexique, en particulier les influences françaises et anglaises sur le haoussa. L'auteur souligne la nécessité d'établir un dictionnaire du parler haoussa moderne y compris les néologismes postérieurs à 1940 et de poursuivre des recherches dans le comportement des mots d'emprunt et sur le vocabulaire haoussa sous l'influence coloniale.

Type
Research Article
Information
Africa , Volume 33 , Issue 1 , January 1963 , pp. 25 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 1963

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References

page 25 note 2 Westermann, D. and Bryan, M. A., The Languages of West Africa, 1952, p. 162.Google Scholar

page 25 note 3 Barth, H., Travels and Discoveries in North and Central Africa, 1857, preface.Google Scholar

page 25 note 4 Groves, C., The Planting of Christianity in Africa, 1950, vol. iii, p. 89.Google Scholar

page 25 note 5 Westermann and Bryan, loc. cit.

page 25 note 6 Cust, R., Modern Languages of Africa, 1883.Google Scholar

page 25 note 7 Section 23 of the third schedule to the Nigeria (Constitution) Order in Council, 1960, lays down that ‘the business of the Legislative Houses of the Northern Region shall be conducted in English and Hausa’.

page 26 note 1 Quoted in Daily Times (Lagos), 22 March 1961.

page 26 note 2 Quoted in West African Pilot, 27 March 1961.

page 26 note 3 Daily Times (Lagos), 16 December 1961.

page 26 note 4 Nationalism aside, such a demand for an indigenous language may be held to find some support from reflection on the plight of English instruction in schools and colleges in Asia. The Times of India (quoted in The Times Educational Supplement, 16 December 1961) lampooned the situation where ‘the average professor is unable to express what little he knows in intelligible English, and many a college student finds it difficult to grasp what he is taught in this language’. Again, the Daily Times (Lagos) reported in its issue of 2 April 1962 how the police had to be called in to a famous Grammar School in Eastern Nigeria to restore order after the pupils had rioted over the poor results obtained in the West African School Certificate which they attributed to the lack of a properly qualified English master. The special issue of the Times Literary Supplement dated 10 August 1962, devoted to English as an international language and sub-titled ‘A Language in Common ’, is worth attention in this context.

page 26 note 5 I exclude Arabic, not because its classification as an African language may be open to question, but because it is already a classical, highly flexible, and a lending rather than a borrowing language.

page 26 note 6 However, the programme for the second meeting of the Inter-African Committee on Linguistics held at Brazzaville in July 1962 included a paper by F. W. Parsons on ‘Some Observations on the Contact between Hausa and English’.

page 26 note 7 Robinson, C. H., Dictionary of the Hausa Language, 1900, 5th edition, 1925.Google Scholar

page 26 note 8 Bargery, G. P., A. Hausa–English Dictionary and English-Hausa Vocabulary, 1934.Google Scholar

page 26 note 9 Abraham, R. C., Dictionary of the Hausa Language, 1949.Google Scholar

page 26 note 10 A Russian–Hausa dictionary, produced under the auspices of Dr. Olderogge and announced for publication in 1963, claims 20,000 entries, among them all the up-to-date scientific and technological terms.

page 27 note 1 Gower, R. H., ‘Swahili Borrowings from English ’, Africa, xxii (1952), 154–7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Earlier discussions on the methods of adapting new Swahili words are to be found in Roehl, K., ‘The Linguistic Situation in East Africa’, Africa, iii (1930)Google Scholar; G. W. Broomfield, ‘Development of the Swahili Language ’, ibid.; Broomfield, G. W., ‘Rebantuization of the Swahili Language ’, Africa, iv (1931)Google Scholar; and Whiteley, W. H., ‘The Changing Position of Swahili in East Africa’, Africa, xxvi (1956).Google Scholar

page 27 note 2 Richardson, I., ‘some Observations on the Status of Town Bemba in Northern Rhodesia ’, African Language Studies, ii (1961), 25–36.Google Scholar

page 27 note 3 The Sudanese Government, for instance, prepared shortly before Independence a glossary of parliamentary and political terms, with their Arabic equivalents.

page 27 note 4 Dr.Saito, Eizaburo's Dictionary of Fresh Words from Foreign Languages, 1961Google Scholar, lists no fewer than 11,000 loan-words that have earned a place in everyday Japanese since 1945. Giving an illustration of this Katakana English, as it is called from the Japanese phonetic syllabary, Dr. Saito in his preface complains how it is quite out of the question in modern Japan ‘to lead our modern raifu (modern life) in a derakkusu aparto (de luxe apartment), putting a jampa (jumper) on, watching puro resu (short for professional wrestling) on the kara terebe (colour TV) and enjoying drinking at the homu ba (home bar)’.

page 27 note 5 In addition to the paper referred to on p. 26, footnote 6, F. W. Parsons read a paper to the Philological Society of Great Britain on English loan-words in Hausa. I have no details of its documentation.

page 27 note 6 Bayanin Kalmonin Da A Ke Anfani Da Su A Maʼaikatu Iri Iri (Kaduna), 1958.

page 27 note 7 Quoted in Scientific and Technical Translating in UNESCO Documentation and Terminology of Science series, 1957, p. 213.

page 27 note 8 Ranganathan, B., ‘Literary Terminology’, Abgila (Delhi), September 1949.Google Scholar

page 28 note 1 Parsons, F. W., Preface to Tsarin Laifuffuka Da Hukuncinsu (Kaduna), 1960.Google Scholar

page 29 note 1 East, R. M., ‘Modern Tendencies in the Languages of Northern Nigeria ’, Africa, x (1937), 97–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 30 note 1 Cardinal Bacci's Italian-Latin Vocabulary (he is the Vatican's master Latin scholar) will doubtless come into prominence again as a result of the Pope's recent insistence on the full restoration of Latin to its traditional place as the language of the Church. See The Times, 9 April 1962.

page 30 note 2 A preliminary Legislative list is given in Glossaries of Technical Terms, Kaduna, 1958, pp. 21–25. The Institute of Administration has a cyclostyled English-Hausa Vocabulary of Local Government Terms.

page 30 note 3 I am most grateful to my friend Umaru Dikko for allowing me to discuss the very impressive list of Hausa words that he, aided by Adamu Mohammed and Ibrahim Tahir, have prepared for their news broadcasts. It is a significant contribution to the Hausa language and deserves wider publication.

page 30 note 4 The reverse process also offers itself for investigation: the assimilation of West African words into English. Prima facie, there has not been the same importation of ‘Coast’ vocabulary as there was of Hindustani. In French, on the other hand, there is a wealth of Arabic and West African loan-words: see R. Mauny's excellent collection, Glossaire des expressions et termes locaux employés dans l'Ouest africain, IFAN, Séries Catalogues, Dakar. In both cases, the army has been an important carrier. I am aware of the sixty-seven ‘idiomatic sentences ’ given in Abraham, R. C., Hausa Literature and the Hausa Sound System, 1959, pp. 45–52Google Scholar, but to me these appear to earn classification as ‘idiomatic ’ because of their syntactical performance and not by virtue of their vocabularic content.

page 30 note 5 Quoted in Partridge, Eric, Slang Today and Yesterday, 1933.Google Scholar

page 30 note 6 Ibid., p. 1.

page 31 note 1 Greenough and Kittredge, Words and Their Ways in English Speech, 1902.

page 31 note 2 Niceforo, A., Le Génie de l'argot, 1912.Google Scholar

page 32 note 1 I am not yet satisfied with the currency of this expression, but it is attractive enough to list here albeit with this caveat. For the Arabic equivalent I thank S. S. Richardson. He it was who first recounted the Hausa phrase to me, addressed to him in the market when he was walking round with two women instead of the usual company of just his wife!

page 33 note 1 Writing of schoolboy slang in Southern Nigeria—on which I am still collecting word-lists from the North—Michael Cooper concludes that ‘Though neither “good ” English nor pidgin, the racy language of the Nigerian schoolboy does illustrate, albeit in a very minor way, something of the extent to which the English language has become part of the everyday life of the young Nigerian. His ingenuity in taking words from common everyday experiences and using them, quite appositely, to describe the things that concern him most, never ceases to delight’ (Ibadan, February 1961, p. 21). It would be interesting to measure how far university slang has penetrated the various institutions of higher education between Nigeria, Ghana, and Sierra Leone. My impression is that so far there has not been a very wide circulation of vocabulary outside the country of origin. Even within Nigeria the five universities talk a different language, with the notable exception of the word ‘bus’, which has a very special and widely understood connotation.

page 33 note 2 See Greenberg, J. H., ‘Arabic Loanwords in Hausa’, Word, iii (1947).Google Scholar

page 34 note 1 See Parsons, F. W., ‘The Hausa Language’, Nigerian Citizen (Zaria), 9 August 1961.Google Scholar

page 34 note 2 Abraham in his Dictionary of the Hausa Language defines malamanci as ‘using abstruse language’. This is not quite the sense in which I use the term in this paper, nor the sense which is gradually being accepted among a growing group of Northern Nigerian friends of mine. Here we consider malamanci to be the non-stop Anglo-Hausa idiom used by the modern leadership generation and illustrated in the following paragraphs.

page 34 note 3 Whether a Hausa Christian is properly entitled to the epithet malam and whether it is best spelt malam or mallam remain nice points of argument in the common-rooms.

page 35 note 1 The danger of this malamanci as a cultural risk is pointed up by the apocryphal (?) story of the mass meeting of Nigerian students summoned in London to protect the purity of the Ibo language from corruption by English influences. The chairman called on every student to stand up and talk for ten minutes in Ibo without introducing a single foreign word. To set the ball rolling, he volunteered to start himself. He got up and addressed the meeting: ‘Well, ladies and gentlemen ….’

page 35 note 2 The Hausaized form boko is, however, a genuine word now, used to describe the Roman script contrast to the Arabized script, ajami. In Swahili both littafi and buku are current for ‘book’, the former of Arabic derivation and the latter an English corruption.

page 36 note 1 The karen mota has had a new lease of life with the coming of the 12-seater minibus, colourfully known in Hausa land as keya keya or oya oya (Southern words, though soon to be claimed as Hausa, I feel) and bolekaja (Yoruba: ‘Let's get down and fight’, a reflection on the pugnacity of the karen mota rather than the temper of the passengers). In other parts of Nigeria the karen mota is known, prosaically, as ‘conductor ’ or ‘mate ’. In Accra this vehicle is called toro-toro from its original 3d. fare. In Senegal it seems to be known by its French term, le car rapide. Yet autre temps, autre maurs: in Northern Nigeria a karen mota gently chided me the other day and pointed out that their union intends to urge the upgrading of every karen mota to the prestigeful title of malamin baya (the learned one of the back)!

page 37 note 1 Leslau, Wolf, ‘Local Participation in Language Research ’, National Conference on the Teaching of African Languages and Area Studies, Washington, 1960, p. 41Google Scholar. I was even luckier when studying Hindustani, for as a young subaltern with a disciplined body of troops no one was in a position to answer me as I deserved when I marched up to my platoon-havildar and solemnly asked him, in an attempt to test my vocabulary: ‘How many brothers and sisters has your maternal aunt ? ’

page 37 note 2 Gower, op. cit. In a paper on ‘Extra-linguistic Influences on the Evolution of Conjugation on Bulu’, read at the Semaine Linguistique held at Dakar in April 1962, Professeur Alexandre of the École Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes noted the same phenomenon of a drivers' language, full of loan-words and multilingual borrowings, along the Cameroun–Nigeria border.

page 38 note 1 Parsons, Preface to Tsarin Laifuffuka Da Hukuncinsu, Kaduna, 1960.

page 39 note 1 Loc. cit.

page 39 note 2 See p. 27, footnote 4.

page 39 note 3 The Times, 6 December 1961.

page 40 note 1 An interesting exercise is to read through the appendix to Hodgkin, Thomas, African Political Parties, Penguin, 1961Google Scholar, with this in mind. In the context of African languages and political parties, attention is drawn to two valuable discussions in St. Antony's Papers, no. x, 1961: Wilfred H. Whiteley, ‘Political Concepts and Connotations ’, and T. L. Hodgkin, ‘A Note on the Languages of African Nationalism’.

page 40 note 2 But the lists of neologisms at pp. 37–38 n. would!

page 41 note 1 I understand that ‘French ’ West Africa has not only taken over le boy for a male domestic servant but has also created la boyesse |

page 42 note 1 See ‘Sergeant-Major's Bark Loses its Bite in Malay’, The Times, 14 June 1961, p. 9. While the Indonesians are satisfied, Malay is proving less tractable. The Times correspondent points out that although mata is the word for ‘eye ’, with the plural mata mata, the same phrase of mata-mata is also a graphic word for a policeman, so that the shout mata-mata kiri, grammatically unexceptionable for ‘eyes right’, ‘would only dissolve a parade into helpless laughter—or send it in search of a policeman ’.

page 42 note 2 E. Sapir, Culture, Language and Personality, ed. D. G. Mandelbaum, 1949, chap. i.

page 42 note 3 E. Sapir, Language, 1921, chap. ix.

page 42 note 4 Loc. cit.

page 42 note 5 I am grateful to Dr. John Spencer for drawing my attention to how, in this connexion, an interesting start was made by one of the working groups at the Third Leverhulme Conference, on ‘Universities and the Language Problems of Tropical Africa ’ held at the University College, Ibadan, in January 1962. It would seem likely that a similar interest may be revealed in the symposium on multilingualism scheduled for the Second Meeting of the Inter-African Committee on Linguistics at Brazzaville in July, 1962.