The Hausa Language: An Encyclopedic Reference Grammar.

• Author: Kaye, Alan S.
• Position: Reviews of Books

The Hausa Language: An Encyclopedic Reference Grammar. By PAUL NEWMAN. Yale Language Series. New Haven: YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 2000. Pp. xl + 760.

Afroasiatic languages number well into the hundreds, but reference grammars about them are few. This is all the more evident for the Chadic branch of Afroasiatic with approximately 150 languages, most of which remain "grammarless." Although many grammatical treatises of Hausa--Chadic's best-known member with about 35 million speakers, mostly in Nigeria and Niger (see the extensive listing in the bibliography, pp. 741-53)--have been published, going back to the nineteenth century, this is only its second modern reference grammar (the first has been utilized by Newman [p. 3]: H. Ekkehard Wolff, Referenzgrammatik des Hausa [Monster: LIT, 1993]). Indubitably, Hausa linguistics has come a long way from the days of its "father," James Frederick Schon (1803-1889) (p. 2).

The volume undergoing review is extensive--740 large pages in a small yet readable font--probably the reason, along with the very detailed table of contents (pp. vii-xxxii), for the author's decision to entitle it "encyclopedic." Impeccably organized and with a good index (pp. 755-60), this tome sets a high standard of excellence for other linguists to emulate. Its focus is Standard Hausa; however, the author happily includes many dialectal notes.

In reading this grammar, I was struck with parallels to the situation of Amharic, the national language of Ethiopia. Even though the Semitic subbranch of Afroasiatic is more fortunate than Chadic in that it has many meticulous grammars (e.g., William Wright, A Grammar of tile Arabic Language [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1859-1862], or Hans Bauer and Pontus Leander, Historische Grammatik der hebraischen Sprache des Alten Testamentes [Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1922]), most of them are dated and less comprehensive vis-a-vis the inner workings of the language than the present book. It was not until 1995, in fact, that the Semitic field could welcome Wolf Leslau's 1,044-page Reference Grammar of Amharic (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz), which, like Newman's grammar, is much more detailed than any treatise published before it. It is only coincidental that Amharic, like Hausa, happens to be an African Afroasiatic language receiving exhaustive treatment by the leading specialist on the language and its family. Newman tells us in his preface (p. xxxv) that he was in the first Peace Corps group in...