Social Groups
Hausa
African Peoples
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The Hausa are a large ethnic group of the West African Sahel, concentrated in northern Nigeria and southern Niger, historically organized into walled city-states (the Hausa Kingdoms) later incorporated into the nineteenth-century Sokoto Caliphate. Hausa society is predominantly Muslim and built around a hierarchical emirate system that persists as a subnational traditional authority in Nigeria today. The Hausa language functions as a major regional lingua franca across the Sahel, spoken as a second language by tens of millions beyond the ethnic Hausa population itself.
Facts
Group TypeSourced to the subject's own account Typical RegionSourced to the subject's own accountWest Africa and the Sahel (northern Nigeria and southern Niger) 1 Primary LanguageSourced to the subject's own account Subsistence ModeSourced to the subject's own accountHistorically agrarian and strongly commercial, with Hausa traders operating long-distance trans-Saharan and West African trade networks for centuries. 1 Disputed
Population Estimateestimated 40 to 80 million 1 Sourced to the subject's own accountThe Hausa are frequently cited as one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa, but totals differ enormously by source depending on whether closely related Hausa-speaking and culturally assimilated populations are counted together. Sources
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