Indonesian and Hausa

As a foreigner from an entirely different part of the planet, I, during my stay in Indonesia, found some traumas which I personally describe as "ever memorable." One of these is the linguistic similarity between the Hausa language and Indonesian. Apart from the ethnic and cultural differences as well as the geographical distance between Indonesia and West Africa, I found many similarities.

Let me explain the Hausa language for those readers who may not have heard of it.

Northern Nigeria is the home-base of this language and it's spoken as a lingua-franca by most people of Northern Nigeria. In the Southern part, not many can understand it, but generally it's second in Nigeria only after English, our official language since independence from Britain in October 1960. In the neighboring republic of Niger, it's the national language that is spoken by almost all of the citizens. In the football giant country of Cameroon quite a few people speak it. It is not unknown in Ghana, Chad and some parts of Sudan.

At the moment, this language is used for broadcast by the BBC, VOA, Radio Peking, Radio Germany and a number of African and Arab Radio Stations. More than half of its vocabulary is from Arabic, with a well corrupted pronunciation that suits the indigenous people. Other vocabularies came from negroid terminologies of ancient times as well as from British English.

I have been coming across a substantial number of Indonesian words that originated from Arabic. For example, the words kursi, majelis, ahli, ajaib, afiat, fajar, fasih, fikir, riba and kubur.

In Hausa, all seven days of the week are quoted in Arabic. All figures starting from 20-90 are directly taken from Arabic. Any Hausa word which (in writing or pronunciation) starts with "al" is from Arabic. For example, Al Muhajir, Al Qalam, Al Khubz, Al Qurya are Arabic but in Hausa pronounced thus Almajiri, AlQalami, AlKhubus and Al Karyah, respectively.

In the second category, there are words which we can find in both Hausa and Indonesian whose meanings are similar but with a slightly different pronunciation. For example, the words bayar (pay), majlis (council), bahaya (danger), akhirat (hereafter), alamat (address), ilmu (knowledge), malaekat (angel) and jenazah (remains).

I had little interest in learning Indonesian when I first arrived in Jakarta. But as an Arabic speaker and an ethnic Hausa man I later realized it would be a relatively easy for me to learn.

BUHARI ABDU

Jakarta