Medieval and classical periods in African history are a particular focus of this survey of language contact patterns seen on the African continent. The effects of languages associated with empires and kingdoms are shown to vary widely, with many such languages remaining influential even in the present day. Disentangling earlier patterns of language contact is a necessary step for those interested in reconstructing and classifying African languages. The great time depth and diversity found within each of the major African language phyla is mirrored by a dizzying array of contact patterns both within and across these phyla.

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?

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.