Musa for Hausa

Hausa is a Chadic language spoken by 70 million people in Nigeria and Niger, and another 40-50 million as a second language across a broader region. The Hausa are a very interesting people, at the crossroads of West Africa, who over the course of millennia have been trading, speaking, and marrying with their neighbors: Berbers to the north, Niger-Congo speakers to the south, Fulani to the west, and other herdsmen speaking Chadic and Sudanic languages along the Sahel to the east.

The Hausa language also shows mixed influence. Like other Afro-Asiatic languages, Hausa often inflects and coins words by changing the vowels, while keeping the consonants unchanged. This makes it a good candidate for Musa Abugida gait, in which vowels are written as decorations on the consonants. However, Hausa also features many sounds shared with neighboring Niger-Congo languages, like implosives, ejectives and (famously) tones.

Hausa used to be written in Ajami, an Arabic script, but in the last century it has been written in Boko, a Latin script. Boko uses little hooks to distinguish variants of English Latin letters, but does not indicate tone or vowel length, both of which are important in Hausa. Why should the Hausa accept a writing system that can't write all the sounds of their language?

Nigeria is a huge and very diverse country. It has over 200 million people, and at least 500 languages, and accomodating all that diversity has been a challenge for a century. Because of its colonial history, English is the official language, so it's natural that most other Nigerian languages are also written in the English alphabet. But that hasn't worked so well: many Nigerian languages have sounds for which the English alphabet doesn't have letters.

Back in 1928, a group of scholars developed the Africa Alphabet of 36 letters. This was followed in 1978 by the African Reference Alphabet of 60 letters (in the final version), and a few years later by the Pan-Nigerian Alphabet of 33 letters for only Nigerian languages. But none of these alphabets were widely used or well supported by keyboards and fonts.

With the arrival of Unicode in this century, there are now 1350 letters in the Extended Latin Alphabet, and pretty well supported. But incredibly, some Nigerian languages are still missing letters, for example vowels with both underdots and tone marks.

Perhaps as a result of this sad history, and of a desire to write in a less colonial alphabet, many Nigerian languages now have new proposed alphabets: Tafi for Hausa, Ndebe for Igbo, Oduduwa for Yoruba, and Adlam for Fula, for example. The danger is that Nigeria will be split into regions that can't read each other's scripts, and the end result will be that, instead of promoting Nigerian languages, everybody will be forced to write in English, even to spell the names of people and places, as happens now in India.

Musa is an apt solution. It can write all the Nigerian languages (and English!) with an alphabet based on only 10 basic shapes, on a 20-key keyboard. In Musa, the same letters always stand for the same sound, which is not the case now, so that a Hausa speaker can read an Igbo name with no problems, even if he doesn't speak Igbo. Not only does it write the tones we need, but it doesn't reward you for not writing tones, as happens now - people get lazy, and omit the tone marks. And while Musa isn't a purely Nigerian solution, it's also not a legacy of the colonial past.

The big advantage of Musa over both Boko and Ajami, is that Musa offers letters for all the Hausa sounds, including some that are only used in certain dialects. We don't need apostrophes to write ejectives, and we have ligatures for palatalized and labialized sounds, so that for example ƙʸ and ƙʷ are both written with single letters.

Unlike Boko and Ajami, Musa writes the distinction between apical r and retroflex ɽ, between affricate ts' dj and sibilant s' zh, between unvoiced c and ejective c', and writes the glottal stop even when initial. Most significantly, Musa shows the many alterations in pronunciation, including assimilation and reduction - we write what you're saying, not what you're thinking.

Hausa is normally written in Musa Abugida gait, like other Afroasiatic languages. In Abugida gait, vowels, tones, and the long mark (used to mark a vowel as long) are written above or below consonants. Here are the Hausa vowels (using د as "chair"):

Vowels

Short Vowels	Front	Back
Close	ِد  i	ُد  u
Mid*	ٜد  e	ُد  o
Open	َد  a

*We show letters for short e o above, but only for dialects that distinguish them. In most dialects, they have merged into short a.

Long vowels are written with a following vertical stroke, called the long mark. They only occur in syllables with no final consonant - closed syllables all have short vowels.

Long Vowels	Front	Back
Close	ِد  i	ُد  u
Mid	ٜد  e	ُد  o
Open	َد  a

Occasionally, a syllabic nasal forms its own syllable. In that case, we write the syllable as a nasal consonant (m n ng) followed by the nasal vowel .

High and low tone are shown by the height of the vowel: high tone vowels are written above the consonant, and low tone vowels are written below the consonant. Falling tone vowels are written high, but they have a falling accent mark under the consonant. If the vowels are long, the long mark goes on the right, but the opposite height of the vowel.

Consonants

Consonants		Labial	Coronal	Palatal	Dorsal			Glottal
Consonants			Hissing	Hushing	Palatalized	Plain	Labialized
Nasal		م  m	ن  n			ن  ng
Implosive		َٻ  ɓ	ط  ɗ		ۑ  'y/ƴ
Plosive	Voiced	ب  b	د  d	ج  j	ࣃ  gʸ	غ  g	ࣃ  gʷ
	Unvoiced		ت  t	ث  c	ݣ  kʸ	ك  k	ݣ  kʷ	ع  '
	Ejective		ط  ts'	ث  c'	ࣄ  ƙʸ	ق  ƙ	ࣄ  ƙʷ
Fricative	Voiced		ز  z	ج  j
	Unvoiced	ف  f	س  s	ش  sh	ف  fy			ه  h
	Ejective		ط  s'
Approximant			ل  l		ي  y		و  w
Rhotic			ر  r̃	ر  r

The glottal stop (marked with ' above) is used when a vowel starts a word, as well as within words.

As you noticed, not only does Musa have all the letters needed for Hausa, but they form a system: letters that sound alike, look alike. This makes Musa easier to learn, and makes it possible to fit Hausa on a small keyboard: only 20 keys.

Clearly, Musa can write Hausa better than Boko or Ajami, and it's easier to learn. And Musa can also be used for all the other languages of Nigeria, Africa, and the world.

Sample



A bar kaza cikin gaashinta.

A Dual Text

To illustrate what Hausa looks like written in Musa, here's a dual text: a paragraph from the Hausa Wikipedia article on Nigeria, first in Musa and then in Boko for comparison.

‌

Najeriya kasa ce mai yawan Al'umma da ke zaune sama da kabilu guda 250 wadanda ke magana da yarurruka daban daban guda 500, dukkansu suna dauke da al'adu iri daban daban. Manyan kabilun guda uku sune Hausa-Fulani a arewa, Yarbawa a yamma, da kuma Igbo a gabas, wadanda suka hada da kashi 60% na yawan mutanen. Yaren hukuma shine Ingilishi, wanda aka zaba don sauƙaƙe haɗin harshe a matakin ƙkasa. Tsarin mulkin Najeriya ya tabbatar da 'yancin yin addini; kuma kasa ce dake dauke da Al'ummar musulmai da Krista na duniya, a lokaci guda.