Hausa is the most widely spoken language in West Africa by number of native speakers and serves as a major lingua franca across the Sahel belt stretching from Senegal to Sudan. In Niger, Hausa-speaking communities concentrated in the south along the Nigerian border form the demographic majority, connected linguistically to the far larger Hausa-speaking population of northern Nigeria. Hausa belongs to the Chadic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family — making it genetically unrelated to the Niger-Congo languages that dominate most of West Africa — though it shares extensive vocabulary with its neighbors through centuries of trade. The ancient Hausa city-states (the Hausa Bakwai) and the later Sokoto Caliphate, founded in 1804, gave Hausa a prestige written tradition in the Arabic-derived Ajami script long before European contact. French colonization from the late 19th century established French as the language of administration; Niger became independent in 1960 and retained French as the sole official language, though Hausa is the dominant language of commerce, radio broadcasting, and everyday communication for the majority of the population.
