Hausa

Hausa is the most widely spoken Chadic language and a major Sahel-region lingua franca, with ~40M L1 + ~40M L2 across northern Nigeria, Niger, and a wide trade/Islamic diaspora reaching Ghana, Cameroon, Chad, Sudan, and beyond. It uses two writing systems: Boko (Latin, standardized 1930s) for state/secular use and Ajami (Arabic-derived) for centuries-old Islamic literary tradition. Linguistically Hausa has 2 phonemic tones (high/low), vowel length distinction, and an SVO order with rich verbal aspect — including the unusual Chadic intransitive-copy-pronoun construction. The 19th-century Sokoto Caliphate established Hausa as the imperial-administrative lingua franca of much of the West African Sahel.