Are Arabic and Hausa Cognate Languages?
This article is primed to investigate with a view to establishing whether Arabic and Hausa are cognates or not. Since languages are said to be living or alive, the concept of identicalness is a possible phenomenon as applicable to other living creatures. The researchers adopted secondary method in collecting the data for this study. This data comprised diagrams of the linguistic family trees and samples of lexical items taken from the two languages under study, and analysed. The lexical items are 25 in number, which we tabulated, tone-marked and glossed accordingly for purposes of clarity and correctness in articulation on the part of the readership both locally and internationally. The analysis paved the way for the investigators to ably pin down and clearly pinpoint cases of cognacy or cognateness appropriately as the case may be, which made them to arrive at a conclusion. The researchers chose the genetic hypothesis propounded by Hale in 2007, as a theoretical background for this study. From the analysis of the linguistic family trees of both languages as well as the lexical items, the findings of the study suggested that both languages are actually cognates. A few of these lexical items include: Arabic𝄗sab’i:nHausa𝄗sàbà’in𝄗‘seventy’;Arabic𝄗huku:mahHausa𝄗hùkuumàa𝄗‘government’; Arabic𝄗 jamhu:riyyah – Hausa𝄗jamhuuriyàa𝄗‘republic’, etc.
Keywords: Arabic, Hausa, philology, cognacy, genetic hypothesis
