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1. Arabic within the linguistic map of the Sudan Sudan is the largest country in Africa, with an area of almost 1 million square miles inhabited by about 33 million people. Like many of the tropical African countries, it is characterized by linguistic density and diversity, with more than one hundred languages (113, according to the 1956 census). These languages belong to three out of the four language families into which all the languages of Africa are classified (Greenberg 1966). The 1956 census showed…

1. Introduction Most scholars who speculate on the origin of the Hausa agree that the Hausa's ethnic composition includes a Hamitic element. If Palmer's (1967:95) view is taken as reasonably true, the Hausa people developed from a mixture of groups migrating from the central Sahara (due to desertification) to the central savanna in the south during the 1st millenium C.E. The new group which emerged out of that contact was relatively more sophisticated and later on absorbed a number of other small ethnic gr…