Last update:
9 February 2010
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Hausa
2001. xxxiv, 754 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Hardbound
– In stock
978 90 272 3807 8 / EUR 200.00 978 1 58811 030 5 / USD 300.00
Hausa is a major world language, spoken as a mother tongue by more than 30 million people in northern Nigeria and southern parts of Niger, in addition to diaspora communities of traders, Muslim scholars and immigrants in urban areas of West Africa, e.g. southern Nigeria, Ghana, and Togo, and the Blue Nile province of the Sudan. It is also widely spoken as a second language and has expanded rapidly as a lingua franca. Hausa is a member of the Chadic language family which, together with Semitic, Cushitic, Omotic, Berber and Ancient Egyptian, is a coordinate branch of the Afroasiatic phylum. This comprehensive reference grammar consists of sixteen chapters which together provide a detailed and up-to-date description of the core structural properties of the language in theory-neutral terms, thus guaranteeing its on-going accessibility to researchers in linguistic typology and universals.
Table of contents
“Philip Jaggar's Hausa provides students and scholars with a comprehensive, well organized, and elegant analysis of the language. [...] Philip Jaggar's Hausa is an invaluable reference for Hausa scholars and students. [...] An especially exciting aspect of the book is that the examples do not simply illuminate a grammatical point, but reveal the vitality of the Hausa language.”
Linda Hunter, University of Wisconsin-Madison in International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 35-2/3, 2002
“It should be easily readable to all those interested in linguistics through the content of many glossed examples as well as through the usage of pan-linguistics terms. The wealth of modern Hausa language data, comprehensive and detailed discussion of grammatical issues (with particular noteworthy chapters concerning the casual syntax and focalization) should also attract the attention of those who are teaching or studying Hausa.”
“It requires specific talents not only to know so much about a given language, but also to be able to arrive at a synthesis, rather than getting lost in nitty-gritty details. In this sense, Jagger's magnum opus, the result of several years of hard work, is indeed a masterpiece. With his contribution, the author has set a new hallmark in the tradition of Hausa scholarship at SOAS.”
“This comprehensive reference grammar provides an informed and up-to-date treatment of the Hausa language that meets the highest standards of descriptive and typological linguistics alike. In covering a broad range of morphological and syntactic phenomena, it represents a major contribution to the field of African language studies in general and Chadic linguistics in particular and will be the standard reference work on Hausa syntax in the foreseeable future. [...] It is the balance between richness of descriptive details, penetrating analysis, and theoretical erudition that makes Phil Jaggar's Hausa book a model for modern reference grammars.”
Subject classification |
Linguistics