Syntactic Structure in Hausa Film Discourse: A Change of a Phase

Author: Dr. Zahra’u Ibrahim Waya (Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria)
Speaker: Dr. Zahra’u Ibrahim Waya
Topic: Language, Dialect, Sociolect, Genre
The GLOCAL AFALA 2023 General Session

Abstract

Hausa language is one of the widely spoken languages across several countries in sub-saharan Africa notably Nigeria, Niger, Ghana, Chad, Mali, Burkina Faso, Sudan, Benin Republic and even beyond. This development has made Hausa films very popular not even within the African region but even internationally. The discourse used in some of these films has generated interest and motivated this research paper. There are syntactic similarities between both English and Hausa. This paper investigates film discourse from syntactic analysis perspective. The research work was transcribed and the data obtained analyzed based on phrase structure rule. The study discovered elements of English sentence structure in the discourse of Hausa films which changes its phase in the study of Hausa language. ‎

Keywords: Hausa, Syntax, Kannywood