Hausa (Nigeria) style guide¶
Write for the reader's task in natural Hausa. This page covers Nigerian Hausa in Latin script; it does not prescribe Ajami spelling or every regional variety. Use it with the shared language review and house guide. Examples illustrate distinctions and need proficient-language review in the actual interface before release.
Voice, terminology and exact meaning¶
Address readers consistently without assuming that every reader is male. Hausa distinguishes gender and number in forms of address: kai, ke and ku are not interchangeable. The supplier's preference for masculine address is a project convention, not a grammatical requirement for every audience. Choose a natural construction for the intended audience and check its agreement.
Explain the task directly. Use the product glossary, retain established terms and log unresolved terminology. Familiarity matters more than replacing every borrowed word or copying English syntax. Keep protected names, filenames, version strings and copyright owners exact. Translate surrounding prose without inventing a local product name or changing a notice's meaning.
Check each verb in context. Zaɓi can express choosing; Zaɓuɓɓuka names options. Bayyana ra’ayinka asks for an opinion and cannot replace every selection instruction. A command to select everything must retain “all”. Shiga and fita distinguish entering and leaving; signing in must not become signing out.
Preserve the complete operation when shortening:
- “Do the following steps” requires the whole sequence. The supplier's Yi daya daga cikin wadanan asks for one of the alternatives instead.
- A command that splits cells must retain splitting and its object. Abin ciki, the supplier's example, does not identify that action.
- Updating fields is different from updating printing. Preserve PostScript, printing order, indentation and whether a prefix applies to each line or each message. A copies control must permit the specified count, not imply exactly one copy.
- Left and right alignment need different labels. The source repeats Daidaito na hagu for both. Hagu identifies left; dama identifies right. Review the complete right-alignment term before use.
- Font weight and paragraph justification need typographic meanings. Do not select a word for personal courage or a reasoned justification simply because English calls the controls “Bold” and “Justify”.
Use sentence case in headings and labels, retaining proper names and literal UI capitalization. Yadda…, Yin aiki tare da… and Yin amfani da… illustrate heading openings, not obligatory templates for every page.
Characters, spelling and punctuation¶
Retain hooked Latin letters. They are distinct from their unhooked counterparts and from visually similar Greek characters.
| Pair | Uppercase | Lowercase |
|---|---|---|
| Ɓ ɓ | U+0181 | U+0253 |
| Ɗ ɗ | U+018A | U+0257 |
| Ƙ ƙ | U+0198 | U+0199 |
| Ƴ ƴ | U+01B3 | U+01B4 |
The source's U+0183 and U+018C are different letters; U+03D2 is a Greek symbol. Its lowercase alphabet also contains an uppercase I where i belongs. Use ordinary Latin A a B b, not Unicode modifier letters selected from the faulty code list. Nigerian spelling commonly represents the hooked-y sound with an apostrophe and y; ƴ occurs in Niger's convention. Preserve the chosen orthography rather than substituting Greek Ύ.
Sequences such as sh, ts, kw, ƙw, gy, gw, ƙy, fy and ky contain multiple Unicode characters. An alphabet list is not an input whitelist: names and identifiers can contain other letters. Use a locale-aware collator, and test hooked letters, apostrophes and mixed-case names rather than sorting the supplier's list by character code.
Ordinary Hausa Latin spelling does not routinely mark vowel length and tone. Keep such marks in quoted linguistic material when they carry information. Use established word division and compounds, including aikace-aikace; do not join or hyphenate all translated multiword expressions mechanically.
Use punctuation to show the sentence structure. Distinguish a hyphen from a range dash and a minus sign: 30–59 retains both endpoints, and −5 is a negative value. A UI ellipsis is …; do not add a fourth dot by copying a prose example. Preserve resource escapes and markup separately from displayed punctuation. Nonbreaking spaces can keep a value with its unit, but must not change identifiers or create a new thousands-grouping rule.
Grammar and complete sentences¶
Choose word order for the actual construction. Attributive adjectives can precede their noun with agreement and a linker, as in sabon littafi. Postposed adjectives and quality constructions also occur; mai sauƙi does not justify a rule that every modifier follows or precedes every noun. Check masculine, feminine and plural forms in context.
Genitive constructions connect more than ownership. Their linker is normally -n with a masculine or plural modified noun and -r with a feminine modified noun. The feminine form is not a rare optional decoration. Examples include Littafin Zainab, Ƙawar Zainab, Mutumin Kano, Man gyaɗa, Tukunyar miya and Ruwan sha. Keep the person, material or purpose expressed by the second element. Pronominal possession has additional forms; do not attach English possessive 's to a protected product name.
Do not apply imported noun-class prefixes such as i- to Hausa brand names. Likewise, do not infer a universal article prefix from the ending of shafin. Supply the appropriate Hausa noun phrase in the full sentence.
Plural formation varies. Source pairs kwamfuta / kwamfutoci, umurni / umurnai and folda / foldodi illustrate why adding English -s is insufficient. Check the glossary's chosen noun, number and agreement. Do not drop an actual count: Mozilla's suggestion to replace {{value}} with a vague “some” loses information and the placeholder.
Tense and mood depend on the subject-pronoun construction as well as the verb phrase. A request or obligation must not become a statement of fact. Do not replace a subjunctive construction with an indicative merely to make it shorter. English “split infinitive” restrictions are not a Hausa editing rule. Preserve negation, conditions, sequence and the action's object.
A save-then-close instruction must retain that order; the source's Adana fayil sai ka rufe folda din illustrates the sequence, not a universal translation for every file or folder operation. Test the complete sentence with the actual names and nouns substituted.
Dates, time and calendar names¶
Use the formatter for the chosen language, territory and calendar. Source examples 17/3/11, 17/03/2011 and 17 Maris 2011 show different presentations of one date. Prefer an unambiguous year where dates could be misread. Pattern letters are API-specific: month and minute tokens may differ by case. A 24-hour example is 05:30:16; add seconds only when useful. Do not treat an absent AM/PM entry as proof that 12-hour time is impossible.
Week start and first-week numbering are separate settings. Rana ta farko a mako means the first day of the week; it is not another name for Sunday. The source's weekday names are Litinin, Talata, Laraba, Alhamis, Juma’a, Asabar and Lahadi, Monday through Sunday. Repeating a full name in an abbreviation column does not shorten it. CLDR 48 uses Jummaʼa for Friday and abbreviated Lit, Tal, Lar, Alh, Jum, Asa and Lah. Use a consistent reviewed set.
The following full forms preserve the supplier's month examples; the short forms are CLDR 48's format abbreviations.
| Month | Source name | Short |
|---|---|---|
| Jan | Janairu | Jan |
| Feb | Fabrairu | Fab |
| Mar | Maris | Mar |
| Apr | Afirilu | Afi |
| May | Mayu | May |
| Jun | Yuni | Yun |
| Jul | Yuli | Yul |
| Aug | Agusta | Agu |
| Sep | Satumba | Sat |
| Oct | Oktoba | Okt |
| Nov | Nuwamba | Nuw |
| Dec | Disamba | Dis |
CLDR's full February name is Faburairu. Its April and July abbreviations differ from the supplier's Afr and Yuli. The supplier's Nay for May is inconsistent with both sets; do not install it as a locale default. Trailing commas in the source list are not mandatory abbreviation punctuation.
Numbers, units and contact details¶
Use locale formatting for quantities and preserve literal codes. CLDR 48 Hausa inherits a decimal point and comma grouping: 500,000.00. The supplier also shows spaces elsewhere; do not mix those examples into one output convention. Its percentage example 100% is a presentation example, not an instruction to alter a numerical value.
For Nigerian naira, distinguish ₦, NGN and the amount. Examples are ₦500.00 and ₦500,000.00; one naira has 100 kobo. Use the currency formatter's spacing and precision. Do not substitute an ordinary N for the currency symbol or convert a price without an explicit requirement.
Preserve standard unit identities and case: km, m, dm, cm, mm; hL, L, dL, cL, mL; t, kg, g, dg, cg, mg and °C. The spelled-out words Mita, Lita and Kilogiram do not license invented symbols such as mt or klg. A millilitre measures volume; a millimetre measures length. Keep value and unit together, as in 25 kg, and preserve non-SI source quantities until a conversion is explicitly required and checked.
Nigeria's country code is +234. The older fixed-line table is obsolete: NCC's 2023 numbering change added 20 before the old national significant fixed-line numbers. Its Lagos pattern is 201 XXX XXXX, with a leading 0 for domestic calls and +234 internationally. The notice also lists ten-digit mobile national significant numbers. A domestic trunk 0 is omitted after the country code. Check the current allocation before publishing real contact details; masked patterns are not callable example numbers.
Preserve the recipient's actual address and delivery method. A P.M.B. number is a private mail bag reference, not a postal code. Keep country and place names accurate, and use clearly fictional people and contact details in examples without implying that an arbitrary number is safe or reserved.
Messages, interface controls and final review¶
Translate the job of each control. A menu category such as Kayan aiki need not be a verb; action buttons can use forms such as Ƙara and Soke. Keep dialog titles consistent with the action that opens them. Group labels, tabs, columns, static text and list entries should identify their contents; checkbox wording must make the enabled state clear. Tooltip and infotip text should explain the control when needed, not repeat its label automatically.
Separate commands, work in progress and completion. Ana rufe shirye shirye describes ongoing closing. Do not label a continuing process as complete or reuse an action noun as evidence of success. In errors, keep the failed object, cause, condition and available recovery. A memory error concerns the computer's memory; it must not accuse the reader of having insufficient thought or ability. A present inability and a past failure can require different wording.
Preserve parameter syntax exactly, including %d, %ld, %u, %lu, %c, %s, %1!d!, %2!d! and %1!-.200s!. Check substituted values, agreement and order; never translate a type specifier or remove dynamic data. Retain technical identifiers such as RAM, HTML and TCP/IP, and explain unfamiliar terms without inventing acronyms.
Distinguish command shortcuts, access keys and key names. Match actual keycaps such as Ctrl, Shift, Tab, Enter and Esc. Test arrow and numeric-keypad behavior on the supported keyboard layout; do not install the supplier's bindings as universal defaults. Input support must include hooked letters without conflicting with commands.
Accessibility applies to Hausa. Review names and instructions with a screen reader, keyboard-only navigation, zoom and narrow layouts. Check that marks survive copy, search and export, and that expanded strings remain readable. Use the shared review checklist for the final terminology, formatting, message and interaction checks.
Adapted from Microsoft Hausa guidance and Mozilla's Hausa community guide. Credits record the sources, corrections, scope and Mozilla source notices and adaptation terms.