Analyzing the Pluralization Processes in the Hausa Language

Abstract

Hausa belongs to the western Chadic group of languages of the Afro-Asiatic family of African languages phylum and the lingua-franca of not only Nigeria but the whole of West Africa. This paper titled “Analyzing the Pluralization Processes in the Hausa Language” is a review of some existing literatures on the subject of pluralization in the Hausa language, with the aim of ascertaining the validity or not of the position of some scholars on the pluralization processes in Hausa language. The sources of data were through observation and introspection and also from unpublished and published materials. The published source includes books, journals and articles. The
unpublished ones include dissertation, thesis and project and the intuition of the presenter as a native speaker of the language constitute the sources of data for the analysis. The methodology and theoretical framework of this research is concerned with the application of morphological description which is the characteristic of most twentieth century linguistic theory called Descriptive Approach which is the basis of modern attempt to characterize the structure of language as exemplified in the work of Leonard Bloomfield and others, Sterm (1983). It’s also adopted Word based method and item and process approach for the analysis of the data. Finally, the paper discovered that it is not only suffixation, which is morphologically referred to attachment of an element at the final position of word that is involve in the formation of plurals in Hausa as posit by the previews literature but rather Vowel Change and
Circumfixation are also involve as it has been seen from the data presented and analysed. It is finally recommended in this paper that the early literatures and position of early scholars on some issues on the studies of language has to be revisited and reviewed more especially African languages.