Hausa-language

Hausa
Harshen Hausa هَرْشَن هَوْسَ‬
Native to	Niger, Nigeria, Ghana, Benin, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Togo and Libya.
Region	Niger, Nigeria
Ethnicity	Hausa people
Native speakers	(27,374,100 cited 1991) 19.5 million L2 speakers
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Chadic West Chadic Hausa–Gwandara (A.1) Hausa
Writing system	Latin (Boko alphabet) Arabic (ajami) Hausa Braille
Official status
Official language in	Niger (national status) Nigeria
Language codes
ISO 639-1	`ha`
ISO 639-2	`hau`
ISO 639-3
Glottolog	`haus1257`
Linguasphere	`19-HAA-b`
Areas of Niger and Nigeria where Hausa people are based
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Hausa (/ˈhaʊsə/) (Yaren Hausa or Harshen Hausa) is the Chadic language (a branch of the Afroasiatic language family) with the largest number of speakers, spoken as a first language by some 27 million people, and as a second language by another 20 million. The ancestral language of the Hausa people, one of the largest ethnic groups in Central Africa, Hausa is commonly spoken throughout southern Niger and northern Nigeria. It has developed into a lingua franca across much of Western Africa for purposes of trade.

Hausa belongs to the West Chadic languages subgroup of the Chadic languages group, which in turn is part of the Afroasiatic language family.

Native speakers of Hausa, the Hausa people, are mostly found in Niger, in the north of Nigeria, and in Chad. Furthermore, the language is used as a trade language across a much larger swathe of West Africa (Benin, Ghana, Cameroon, Togo, Ivory Coast etc.), Central Africa (Chad, Central African Republic, Gabon) and in northwestern Sudan, and Some parts of Ethiopia particularly amongst Muslims.