Wiktionary:About Hausa

This is a Wiktionary policy, guideline or common practices page. Specifically it is a policy think tank, working to develop a formal policy. Policies – Entries: CFI - EL - NORM - NPOV - QUOTE - REDIR - DELETE. Languages: LT - AXX. Others: BLOCK - BOTS - VOTES.

Hausa (ISO code ha) is a Chadic language spoken chiefly in Nigeria and Niger, in West Africa. This page documents common practices and standards used across Wiktionary in entries for this language.

Dialects

By default, entries are assumed to reflect standard written Hausa. Where they do not, they should have labels denoting which dialects use a term (using the name of the dialect or the city it is spoken in). If it is not known which dialect a term belongs to, it can be marked with the label dialectal.

Nigerian Hausa is the default; terms used only in Niger or other countries or with specialised meanings there should be labelled as such. The letter ƴ can be used in alternative-spelling entries marked with the label Niger; the lemma should be housed at the spelling with 'y.

Not all dialects have tone or gender distinctions, but these should still be given where appropriate in all entries.

Orthography

The standard Latin script boko system should be used, with the special letters ɓ, ɗ, and ƙ (but 'y instead of ƴ, except for Nigerien alternative spelling entries). Glottal stops should be written as i except at the beginning of a word, where they should be left unwritten.

Diacritical marks should not be used in page titles, but should always be used in headwords. These are the tilde on the trilled r (r̃), the macron for vowel length, and tone markers. The macron (¯) should always be used for long vowels, with short vowels unmarked (rather than the alternative system where long vowels are unmarked and short vowels marked with an cedilla). High tone is left unmarked, low tone is marked with a grave (`), and falling tone with a circumflex (ˆ). Long vowels with low tone should be written with the macron as the lower (composed) character, for example ā̀. An initial capital R is always rolled, and therefore R̃ need never be written.

Entries in Ajami (Arabic script) may be created only if the term is attested in that script with that spelling, and should be soft redirects to the Latin-script spelling.