By Furera Bagel, PhD.
Sometimes in May last year, I received a call from a lady who said she was calling from Lagos and had gotten my number from someone because she told them she wanted to learn Hausa and would love me to direct her to any available online Hausa classes. Because I wasn’t aware of any, I reached out to prof Malumfashi ,and he confirmed that but assured me there’s a process to start one.
The lady confessed to me that she was originally from Kaduna State but grew up in Lagos and, therefore, didn’t learn to speak Hausa.
She said what sparked her interest in the language was when she started getting offers for Hausa -English translations from some foreign contacts that paid in dollars, but she couldn’t do it herself and had to pass it to her brother, who speaks the language fluently.
There are many like her in the making because there is a new trend of parents speaking to their children only in English while at home. Those kinds of children are the future, if they grow up speaking Only English language then we are surely heading towards a monolingual society, which is not good at all.
If that happens, then who is going to fill all the positions that only Hausa speaking people need?
As we just celebrated Hausa Day recently, I would like to use the opportunity to educate and inform the people about the advantages of speaking the language.
There are a plethora of opportunities attached to speaking Hausa, which many don’t know about, and some, even when they do, fail to take the advantage.
There’s an opportunity for educated Hausa speakers in many occupations across the continent and the globe.
Three years ago while I was in Nairobi, Facebook engaged the services of a company that employed some speakers of some major African languages, including Hausa, to work on regulating Facebook posts. So many Nigerian students got the job, and out of those, only 2 were originally Hausa. All the rest had other ethnic affiliations.
I once met a Berom man while on transit who told me he was going to Nairobi for an English to Hausa translation job, which he did frequently. I concluded that for him to buy a plane ticket and spend more than a month in a hotel in a foreign country, that job must be worth it. Though when I asked him for the name of the organisation he refused to tell me, and I understood that it was, perhaps, out of fear that he might lose his lucrative enterprise to someone who lived in the country.
I have also met others like him who were there for the translation job.
I have a Yoruba Facebook friend, who actually went to the USA on a Fulbright program to teach Hausa Language because he could speak the language.
International organizations are paying a very good amount of money for translations, interpretations and transcriptions from English to Hausa vice versa.
There’s a Facebook group Hausa Language Technology, where many educational and job opportunities relating to Hausa language advertised. Sadly I hardly see the youths patronizing the page.
I have conducted a paid qualitative research in some remote areas of Bauchi with a guy from South-South called Nsikak who spoke Hausa fluently–and yes, proficiency in Hausa was a criteria for the job.
Sadly there is a recent trend among educated Northerners to speak only English to their children despite those opportunities attached to speaking the language.
Why would people cheat their children out of something they benefit from? For example, David Keyon was a Berom from Plateau State who became the head of VOA Hausa service because he could speak the language, so it would be sad if someone like him refused to teach Hausa to his children despite having enjoyed the privileges attached to the language.
Yet still, many parents are bent on this path, and if they succeed, then, we are in the danger of having a monolingual society, which will definitely be tragic.
