Hausa

Hausa is the chief language of the Chadic branch of the Afroasiatic family and the native tongue of the Hausa of Hausaland, in northern Nigeria and southern Niger. The Hausa Bakwai city-states took shape between the seventh and eleventh centuries; the walls of Kano were begun under Sarki Gijimasu in 1095 and completed in the fourteenth century.

Islam spread through the cities from the fourteenth century, and Kano and Katsina became centres of trans-Saharan commerce. By the early fifteenth century Hausa was being written in an adapted Arabic script called Ajami, which produced the Kano Chronicle and, in the seventeenth century, Abdullahi Suka's Riwayar Nabi Musa, the earliest known Hausa book.

Hausa became a merchants' lingua franca beyond its homeland. In the early nineteenth century Usman dan Fodio led a jihad that made Sokoto the new centre of Hausa Islamic scholarship.