Hausa
Americannoun
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Hausas,
plural
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Hausa
plural
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a member of an Indigenous people of northern Nigeria and southern Niger whose culture has been strongly influenced by Islam.
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the language of the Hausa people, belonging to the Chadic branch of the Afroasiatic family, widely used in Africa as a language of commerce.
noun
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a member of a Negroid people of W Africa, living chiefly in N Nigeria
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the language of this people: the chief member of the Chadic subfamily of the Afro-Asiatic family of languages. It is widely used as a trading language throughout W Africa and the S Sahara
Other Word Forms
Noun Inflected Forms
Example Sentences
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With some 80 million speakers of the north's Hausa language spread across west and central Africa -- not to mention the vast Nigerian diaspora around the world -- Kannywood's potential market is huge.
From Barron's ● Jan. 9, 2026
Arewaflix will be a service "not only for Hausa films, but also for films in other languages from northern Nigeria", including Nupe and Kanuri, Amart said.
From Barron's ● Jan. 9, 2026
Local residents dubbed it Boko Haram - a name which in the Hausa language loosely translates as "Western education is forbidden" because of their opposition to Western-style schools.
From BBC ● Nov. 27, 2025
Nzeogwu spoke fluent Hausa and was as 'Hausa' as any!
From BBC ● Feb. 25, 2025
Richard caught the end of it—“But the man’s ghost came out and spoke to the vandals in Hausa and they left his house alone”—and he envied her belief in ghosts.
From "Half of a Yellow Sun" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Goodluck Jonathan – who served from 2010 to 2015 – had a relatively balanced team of two ethnic Fulanis, two Hausas, one Atyap, one Igbo, one Yoruba and one Calabar.
From BBC ● May 26, 2025
But the Chadian government refused to allow them passage, which led to a community of Hausas eventually settling in Darfur and other parts of Sudan.
From BBC ● Jul. 22, 2022
It gave rise to the authorities' belief that these communities, including the Hausas, were behind the opposition protests - and some of them were expelled from Khartoum and its twin city Omdurman.
From BBC ● Jul. 22, 2022
The Hausas in the north, who furnish the backbone of Britain's tough West African Rifles, are Moslems.
From Time Magazine Archive
Here, for the first time since the beginning of the campaign, the Hausas received a small issue of meat, and their delight was unbounded.
From Through Three Campaigns A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti by Walter Paget
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Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
