Hausa Online

Learning Hausa (and other less commonly taught languages) using the Internet

Hausa Wikipedia is growing

Posted by hausaonline on Wednesday, July 22, 2009

About a year ago,  I warned in a blog post that Hausa Wikipedia could soon be closed, due to lack of activity. I don’t know whether it was because of this post or due to some other factors, but since then, Hausa wikipedia is growing fast.  Have a look, and maybe you feel like contributing something yourself or editing (please, don’t vandalize!) the articles that have been written.

If you would like to contribute something, but don’t know how this works, here are some guidelines:

You could start with some topic you are familiar with or translate an article from another language.

A good point to start from could be some online news articles. Some old Hausa school books like “Ikon Allah” would be good source material, too. But make sure you do not just copy what is written there, in order to avoid copyright issues.

5 Responses to “Hausa Wikipedia is growing”

  1. Rita said

    Can someone translate the following from Hausa to English? Am bamu izni mu shigo yau da wajen.

    • John Hutchison said

      An ba mu izini mu shiga yawo a wajen.
      We were given permission to go into a walk (stroll) outside.

      yau = today
      yawo = stroll, wandering
      wajen = outside
      da wajen – not good Hausa
      daga wajen = from the outside
      shiga = enter
      shigo = enter (here) towards speaker

  2. The African Network for Localization (ANLoc) needs your help to complete a computer locale for Hausa. This will take about 2 hours of volunteer time. This is an essential step in producing a permanent IT environment for Hausa.

    The locale data will be used immediately by many organizations, including Wikipedia. The project is described in more detail at http://www.it46.se/afrigen/

    Please contact me at martin+locales at kamusi dot org and I can get you started. It really only takes a little while to complete – someone did the work for Morisyen while relaxing with his Sunday morning coffee this weekend, for example. It is a travesty that the locale hasn’t been completed for Hausa, but with your help we can fix that quickly.

    thanks,
    Martin

  3. honey asal said

    an bamu izni mu shiga yawo a wajen,

    1. we were given permission to take a look around the place,
    2. we were allowed to take a look around the place

    wajen means, “the place”
    waje means. “place, outside” the meaning depend upon the usage in a given sentence. but the word “waje” as used in the above sentence means “the place” If translated to mean “outside” then the hausa sentence is incomplete because something is missing to qualify the word to mean outside.

  4. Rik said

    A useful online English-Hausa dictionary.

    http://nairaland.net/forum/english-hausa-dictionary.php

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