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2 Advances in Minority Language Research in Nigeria

Chapter 5 – Arabic script in modern Nigeria

Andy Warren-Rothlin, United Bible Societies

Keywords: Nigeria, Arabic, script, orthography, Ajami

1 Introduction

“These are not letters of the alphabet, and it is not Greek ... They look like worms, snakes, fly dung ...” – “Ah, it’s Arabic.” (Eco 1983: 173)

Auwal Tijjani (not his real name), a deaf-mute beggar in Biu, northeastern Nigeria, carries a diglossic and digraphic signboard (Figure 1), saying the same Hausa message twice – in Roman script for ‘Christians’, and in Arabic script for Muslims – followed by an Arabic plea, fi sabli llhi, ‘for God’s sake’.

Figure 1: Signboard using Arabic and Roman scripts

Arabic script Andy Warren-Rothlin 3

Meanwhile, the south of Nigeria and most of the Middle Belt is increasingly adopting the triglossic and monographic national vision of Yoruba, Hausa and Igbo all in Roman script, largely unaware of the ancient Arabic-script writing traditions in Hausa, Fulfulde, Kanuri and Yoruba, and so falsely assuming that any Arabic script they see around them (most commonly on the Naira in their pockets) is in fact the Arabic language. Many such people today may be as ignorantly despising of Arabic script as Eco’s mediaeval monk!

2 Arabic script

Arabic Script developed around the fourth century AD from Epigraphic South Arabian script, and ultimately, like Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Greek and Roman/Latin scripts, from the Phoenician alphabet, which was itself originally based on a form of hieroglyphics. Like most other Semitic scripts (except Ethiopic), Arabic script is written from right to left. Even the order of the letters shows this history and relationship, as these alphabets all start with something like abcd, and include a klmn and qrst, as illustrated in Tables 1 & 2. The 28 consonants express in MSA the following phonological system (MSA orthography, IPA symbols and conventional Roman-script transliterations), with 5 of the oldest and most widespread adaptations for use in foreign words (marked here with +), as shown in Table 1.

Table 1: MSA consonants

Labial Dental Alv. Emphatic Palatal Velar Uvul./ Phary.

Glottal

Plosive vl. + /p/ p /t/ t /t/ /k/ k /q/ q / /

Plosive vd. /b/ b /d/ d /d/ + // g

Affricate vl. + /c, /

Affricatevd. /, / j

Fricative vl. /f/ f // /s/ s /s/ /!/ š " /x/ x # /$/ % & /h/ h

Fricative vd. +' /v/ v ( /ð/ ) * /z/ z + /ð/ ) ,, - +. /// ž 0 / 1 / 2 3 / 4 / 5

Nasal 6 /m/ m 7 /n/ n

Flap 8 / 9 / r

Approx. : /l/ l ; /j/ y < /w/ w

Arabic script Andy Warren-Rothlin 5

also the Hebrew article ~ÄO, ha-) to a following apical (alveolar, dental or sibilant –

known in Arabic grammar as the ‘sun’ letters). Hamza (based on 3 / 4 /) marks a

glottal stop (since U, alif, had become mostly used as a mater lectionis). And imla Å

marks the umlauting (sometimes known as awarya, ‘palatalisation’, or arj, ‘twisting’) of an a-vowel to an /e/ sound (only in the Warsh and al-Duri orthographies) etc. It is the concern for preserving the text of the Qur’n and its correct reading which drove all of these linguistic developments. The Qur’n was the first Arabic book, and it thereby standardised the written form of the language (much as the King James version of the Bible did for English), and its preservation in different times and places drove development of the script into multiple readings, multiple orthographies and multiple scripts and writing styles. By prohibiting depiction of divine or human forms, Islamic theology also drove script development, as artistic talents were turned to calligraphy (‘beautiful writing’), with its complex ligatures, and overlapping and intersecting words written from lower right to top left.

3 Arabic script in West Africa

It is often thought that Africa was completely illiterate before the arrival of Europeans. This is quite obviously not true. Not only does Africa have some ancient indigenous traditions such as the Ethiopic script used for Amharic, and the Tifinagh script used by Tuaregs, but the sophisticated Arab culture which had developed the writing system we have just been describing had been active in West Africa from around 1,000 AD, so in various parts of the region, Africans had been writing Arabic script for hundreds of years before they ever encountered Europeans. In the empires of Ghana, Kanem-Bornu, Mali and Songhai, the scholarship of Timbuktu, the spirituality of the Sufi arqt, ‘dervish orders’, and the jihad of Sheikh ÇUthman Éan Fodio, trade, public administration, law, religion and education all used writing – writing in Arabic itself, and in African languages, such as Hausa (Chadic), Kanuri (Nilo-Saharan), and Fulfulde and Yoruba (Niger- Congo). And since Arabic script was the only script anyone had ever known, its use was completely free of ideological value – it was simply the only way to write. These 900 years of prolific Arabic-script literary history ended abruptly when, in Lokoja on 1st January 1900, Frederick Lord Lugard declared the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria, and within a few years got his administration replacing Arabic with English and Hausa in official speech, and Arabic script with Roman script in writing (Philips 2000; a similar break was made around the same time in Chad and other countries). Hausa has probably suffered most, being so closely related to Arabic, not only by its adoption of so many Arabic loan-words, but also genetically (in the Afro-Asiatic family), sharing with Arabic the emphatic letters (, , ts),

6 Advances in Minority Language Research in Nigeria

consonant gemination, phonemic vowel length, simple ai and au diphthongs, a typical CV syllable structure, enclitic subject, object and possessive pronouns, and features of derivational and inflectional morphology, all of which make Arabic script very suitable for writing Hausa. It is as a result of this history that Auwal has to struggle to write his signboard in two scripts for two communities in one language which is not his own.

4 Language and script use in Nigeria

Bilingualism – indeed multilingualism – is a personal competence of the average Nigerian, who typically speaks a local language, a regional language and the international language English. In most of the Middle Belt and Kanuri-land (approx. 8-11°N and 12°E eastwards, or northwards of the Niger and Benue rivers as far as the twelve northern, Fulani-jihad-influenced Hausa Shari’a states), this means a mother-tongue, Hausa and English. His or her choice of language used may be governed by distinct domains (mother-tongue at home and Hausa in the market, for example), or there may simply be a lot of mixing, with code-switching even within a sentence.

Auwal can write Hausa and Arabic, and can probably also read some English and understand Bura and some Kanuri and English.

Diglossia – or polyglossia – is the social reality resulting from personal multilingualism (though the term is sometimes restricted to contexts involving standard and pidgin varieties of the same language, as in the case of English in southern Nigeria, or Arabic in Chad). Nigeria’s francophone neighbours typically have structures to regulate this, such as a Direction de la promotion des langues nationales (DAPLAN), a legally-binding National Alphabet, and organisms for the translation of public policy documents into a set number of official languages. Though Nigeria lacks this level of coordination, the 500+ local and regional languages and English are carving out their history in the morphing of speech communities, primary education, broadcast media, secular and religious translation, publishing and distribution, Naira notes, Nokia phone interfaces and yam flour packets. Digraphia, the co-existence of multiple writing systems for the same language, is a social reality like diglossia, rather than a personal competence like bilingualism. There may be relatively few people who are accustomed on a daily basis to writing Hausa in both Roman and Arabic scripts.

Auwal clearly has good Arabic (correct case-marking on the Arabic genitives, correct Roman-script transliteration including a hooked Ñ in sadaa as in Arabic,

8 Advances in Minority Language Research in Nigeria

The Qur’n is available in both types all over Nigeria, !"# usually published in Lebanon or Saudi Arabia, and Warsh in Lebanon or Kano. Figure 2 shows a page from a maghribi-script Warsh Qur’n, printed in Kano.

Auwal’s maghribi script is marked by his distinguishing between alif maks$ra and final yaa (the last letters of the first and second lines) which are identical in shape

in naskh script à|, the long

tails on his â| r, ä| %, Ü| n and

ã| l, and the square shape of

his d and |å| k.

Special characters or adaptations are usually required for the use of Arabic script in writing

other languages (çlégxw zw , a&jam),

whatever orthography and script type is being used. This is not essentially different from the use in Roman-script orthographies in Nigeria of dotted, underlined or special shaped vowel characters (e. , ' , , ), vowel-length and tone marks (e. , (; á, à, â, )), hooked consonant characters (e. *, , , +, ,, ), di- and trigraphs (e. kp, gb, *, hw, hyw, thl, mthl) and new uses of existing characters (e. c in Hausa for /t!/, a value which it has in no European colonial language), and we have already seen above how modifications are made to the Arabic script elsewhere for p, v, - , ž and g. Thus Hausa has the following consonant phoneme inventory (Warsh orthography, IPA symbols and conventional Roman-script transliterations; 7 adaptations marked here with +):

Figure 2: A page from a maghribi-script Warsh Qur’n, printed in Kano

Arabic script Andy Warren-Rothlin 9

Table 3: Hausa consonants

Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal voiceless /t/ t W /k/ k + 3 / / è voiced /b/ b /d/ d + 0 // g

Plosive

glottalised +ê /ë/ ë + /É/ É +í /jì/ èy Y /Ñ/ Ñ Affricate voiceless + /t!/ c voiced /d// j voiceless X /f/ f /s/ s /!/ sh # /h/ h voiced * /z/ z

Fricative

glottalised +î /s’/ ts Nasal 6 /m/ m 7 /n/ n Flap 8 / 9 / r Approximant : /l/ l ; /j/ y < /w/ w

Similarly, several recent publications in Nigerian Fulfulde use the following (modified orthography, with 13 adaptations):

Table 4: Fulfulde consonants

Labial Alveolar Palatal Velar Glottal voiceless +' /p/ p /t/ t + /c/ c W /k/ k + 3 / / è voiced /b/ b /d/ d // j + 0 // g glottalised +ê /ë/ ë + /É/ É +í /ï/ ñ

Plosive

prenasalised +óá /mb/ mb + ôò /nd/ nd + öò /n/ nj + fò /õ/ ng Fricative /f/ f /s/ s /h/ h Nasal 6 /m/ m 7 /n/ n +ú /ù/ ny +û /õ/ õ Flap 8 / 9 / r Approximant : /l/ l ; /j/ y < /w/ w

Most ajami orthographies also allow for the use, in proper nouns and some loanwords, of Arabic characters not in themselves defined by the orthography (compare the use in English of forms such as naïve, Qatar etc.). Thus Hausa and

Nigerian Fulfulde may often use the Arabic character & /h/ as in ü†pUâ]U, Ibrhm,

and this may influence local use such that the language name Hausa may be spelt

äb°¢w zw (in line with the above phoneme chart) or äb°pw zw (using the Arabic character).

Similarly, the official National Alphabet of Chad has a special section of nine Arabic characters for ‘sounds not distinguished in Roman script’, which will only be used in MSA proper nouns and loanwords. For more on these and other Arabic-

Arabic script Andy Warren-Rothlin 11

These texts are then transferred into books for mass publication, especially by the Tijani order in Kano. However, Sunni schools have modern printed materials in Modern Standard Arabic, printed in Nigeria by publishers such as Longman Nigeria and Ibadan University Press. The most common religious text for

learning Arabic and the Qur’n is ûf §x_•v ,

Juz Amma, the thirtieth and last portion of the Islamic lectionary, and this is available throughout the region in both orthog- raphies. Figure 5 shows a Juz Amma booklet in ¶ß® orthography from Kumasi, Ghana.

As for ajamin Hausa, a few modern primers exist (Binji and Wali 1969; Amudani 2001), but ajami is in these cases mostly taught simply as a bridge to Arabic proper. Institutional signboards are among the most conservative of contexts for Arabic-script writing. Mosques in Bauchi and Tigi both have maghribi Warsh Arabic, diglossic with Roman- script Hausa translation. Figure 6 shows Bauchi Mosque, Bauchi State.

Figure 4: Sura 40 of the Qur’n, aya 1- 40, written on an aloo, Maiduguri

Figure 5: Juz Amma booklet in !"# orthog- raphy from Kumasi, Ghana

12 Advances in Minority Language Research in Nigeria

Gombi mosque has just the maghribi Warsh Arabic. Figure 7 shows Gombi mosque in Adamawa State. Schools in Sokoto in the west and Yola in the east have more modern naskh scripts diglossic with English, but with calligraphic vowel marking and some interesting features, including an unnatural line-break in al-Islamiya, transliteration of Upper (Jimeta) as â©fvx, ‘uf (suggesting influence of Hausa, where /f/ and /p/ are allophones, rather than Arabic, which usually substitutes , /b/), an Arabic-style transcription of Yola as ™† ́v v, Yawl, rather than the Hausa-style ™†x ́v , Y$l/Y/l, and Jimeta written once with and once without long final .

Figure 6: Bauchi Mosque, Bauchi State

14 Advances in Minority Language Research in Nigeria

Figure 9: Signboards in Gusau

Figure 10: Maiduguri roadsign

Arabic script Andy Warren-Rothlin 15

Figure 11: Damaturu roadsign

There may of course be some regional factors at play here, but my sense is that this is above all a question of modernisation, and the diglossia with English occurs on many modern car stickers (Figure 12). There remain, however, a few special

expressions such as ̈ â ́, y Allh, ‘O God’,

òk^Ü â ́, y Muhammad, ‘O Muhammad’, ̈

à≠mT, Allh akbar, ‘God is greater’, and âÆ âÜ

̈, m š’ Allh, ‘Whatever God wills’, which appear frequently on the front or

sides of trucks, and seem to have an almost iconic function, their stylised form being as important as their semantic content (see for example the distinctive

maghribi script form , Muhammad, or à≠mT ̈, Allh akbar in some

modern Kufic-style scripts). As for currency, some interesting historical trends can be noted. A !"#

Figure 12: Car sticker in a Lagos taxi

Arabic script Andy Warren-Rothlin 17

international ™†m âm†m Coca-Cola, T †lm CloseUp toothpaste and ä≠Üâ_< à[m<à\

*à≠Üâ\ Procter and Gamble Pampers, and the products of Egypt’s à∞Ü†ã∏\

Biscomisr, Saudi Arabia’s ik ́ DeemaH and 8<òj_ Gandour, and Lebanon’s †ã[≠Ü

Meptico. Arabic language itself is also found on these product labels – the ubiquitous :∫° halaal, of course, but also in the ingredients, directions for use etc. However, there are probably few Arabic-literate West Africans who read the labels of such products, as is suggested by some of the simple mistakes which regularly appear. The case may be different with the Arabic subtitles to American films on middle- eastern cable networks and on pirated video cassettes; these can be seen in almost every small village in northern Nigeria, and I imagine that children who do not understand the English soundtrack anyway may occasionally be distracted from the action on screen to glance at the letters which they have learnt in the madrasa. Finally, the commonly-available Arabic-enabled mobile phones have doubtless contributed much to the daily use of Arabic script. Despite pressures in public and Islamic education towards English and Arabic respec- tively, and the general romanisation of written Hausa, Arabic-script Hausa or ‘ajamin Hausa’ remains a common medium of com- munication in Islamic communities. It appears

on certain product labels (e. v åªv w v , Ba

giya ba, ‘non-alcoholic’ on Malt Royale, and the recent Arewa series of school exercise books), on public toilet signs (Figure 15), and in personal letters. Specifically religious are the interlinear Qur0n commentaries and pamphlets of Hadith and òfT†£, qaw’id, ‘catechism’, produced by the Tijani order in Kano and sold outside mosques at least as far apart as Niamey and N’Djaména. However, there appears to be a shift in recent years towards higher quality products in more modern formats (including !"# orthography and computer-generated masri script). And in fact there is a wider literature too, including a weekly newspaper

Buhran. Yahaya’s history of Hausa literature lists over 50 works in ajamin Hausa, published in the 1960s and 1970s (Yahaya 1988: 236-9), however, most of them were produced by agencies such as NNPC, NMPP and Gaskiya Corporation, and today’s smaller independent publishers can surely not sustain such a production in

Figure 15: Commercial toilet, Sokoto

18 Advances in Minority Language Research in Nigeria

the minority script. As for other languages in Nigeria and throughout West Africa, the greatest impetus for Arabic-script literacy, as for Roman-script literacy, is coming most recently – ironically, perhaps – from Christian missionary Bible translators. This is after something of a hiatus. In the mid to late nineteenth century, Christian missionaries were publishing Bible portions in Arabic-script Hausa, Fulfulde, Kanuri and Yoruba (Warren-Rothlin 2009) as well as portions of the Qur’n and even a Qur’n translation into Yoruba (Warren-Rothlin forthcoming), but these efforts largely gave way to Roman script from Lugard’s time onwards. A century later, assisted by computer technology which permits instant conversion from Roman-script to Arabic-script, missionaries working in Arabic script in around 20 languages known to me between Senegal and Chad are producing everything from literacy primers, to booklets on public health, local history, traditional folk tales and proverbs, to Bible portions and even whole New Testaments, and on to, again, even Islamic products such as booklets of the ‘99 glorious Names of Allah’. In many of these languages, the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO) is also active. The challenge for Nigeria will be to prevent certain religious elements from responding defensively to this genuinely valuable international investment in its people’s education, and from turning a script which was before Lugard of no ideological import into yet another symbol of social division and cultural protectionism. For non-Muslims to ban ajami from the Naira as ‘Islamic’ or for Muslims themselves to oppose the use of ajami by Christian missionaries would surely be against the pluralistic spirit of Auwal Tijjani.

References

Ali, A. (n.). Roman Transliteration of the Holy Quran: with full Arabic Text and English Translation. Kano: Alkali Sharif Bala. Amudani, Y. 2001. Koyi da Kanka Harsuna uku: Turanci da Hausa da Larabci, Teach yourself three Languages: English, Hausa and Arabic. Kano: Ayab General Enterprises. Binji, H. and Wali, N. S. 1969. (Mu koyi ajami da larabci). Zaria: NNPC on behalf of Gaskiya Corporation. Eco, Umberto. 1983 The Name of the Rose. London: Secker and Warburg. Gumi, A. M. 1980. Tarjamar ma’an/nin Alkur’ani Maigirma zuwa harshen Hausa. Beirut: Dar al-Arabia. Philips, J. E. 2000. Spurious Arabic: Hausa and Colonial Nigeria. Madison: University of Wisconsin African Studies Center. Warren-Rothlin, Andy. 2009. Script Choice, Politics, and Bible Agencies in West Africa. The Bible Translator: Technical Papers 60(1), 50-66.

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