Hausa is an Afro-Asiatic Chadic language spoken in Nigeria, Cameroon and other countries.
Modern Hausa is written in the Roman alphabet, but includes extra letters for implosive consonants and requires special font keyboard support separate from languages like Spanish and French.
Until the 1950s, Hausa was commonly written in the Arabic support. Information about Arabic and Hausa can be found at the sites below:
Many Hausa texts do not mark implosive consonants or tones, but they can be included if phonetics fonts and utlities are downloaded. However, even the character for r-tilde will be difficult to include.
Many sites use k', b', d',y' for implosive consonants, but these spellings are considered workarounds.
As of Spring 2005, the international word processor Global Writer is available in the Student Computing Labs. This allows users to easily switch keyboards, including phonetic keyboards which mimic a QWERTY keyboard.
CLC Student Computing Labs: To open Global Writer, go to the Start » Internatinal Language Support » Unitype Global Writer.
Global Writer is available from Unitype for personal purchace.
The Character Map utility is free on all Windows machines and can be used to copy and paste accented letters and other foreign language characters characters into any Windows application. The Character Map is similar to the Insert Symbol tool found in some Windows applications such as Microsoft Word.
You can use the following ALT key plus a numeric code can be used to type a Latin character (accented letter or punctuation symbol) in any Windows application. More detailed instructions about typing accents with ALT keys are available.
NOTE: Users with older versions of Windows or not using may need to use the Character Map utlitiy (above).
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Hausa support has also been expanded in Windows Vista.
If you are working with a Unicode aware application such as Microsoft Office 2004, Text Edit (free with OS X ), Dreamweaver or Netscape 7 Composer /Mozilla Composer you can activate the Unicode Hex keyboard and use the following option codes.
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Note: The Unicode Hex Input keyboard must be active in order to use the numeric codes; otherwise only the numbers appear.
You can the Character Pallette to these characters. All characters are located in Symbols folder under "Phonetic Symbols".
A freeware Hausa keyboard can be downloaded and installed from Tom Gewicke. To use it:
This site on Hausa computing includes implosive consonants:
For implosive consonants and tones, the following browsers have the most consistent results.
Internet Explorer for Windows may not display implosive consonants by default. Users who prefer Internet Explorer for Windows should set the Latin font to Arial Unicode MS or some other Unicode script with phonetic symbol support.
Internet Explorer for Macintosh does not support implosive consonant symbols.
These are the codes which allow browsers and screen readers to process data as the appropriate language. All letters in codes are lower case.
See Using Encoding and Language Codes for more information on the meaning and implementation of these codes.
Use these codes to input consonants in HTML. For instance, if you want to type saƙar you would type saƙar. These numbers are also used with the Windows Alt codes listed above.
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NOTE: Because these are Unicode characters, the formatting may not exactly match that of the surrounding text depending on the browser.
Computers process text by assuming a certain encoding or a system of matching electronic data with visual text characters. Whenever you develop a Web site you need to make sure the proper encoding is specified in the header tags; otherwise the browser may default to U.S. settings and not display the text properly.
To declare an encoding, insert or inspect the following meta-tag at the top of your HTML file, then replace "???" with one of the encoding codes listed above. If you are not sure, use utf-8 as the encoding.
Generic Encoding Template
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=??? ">
...
<head>Declare Unicode
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8 ">
...
<head>
The final close slash must be included after the final quote mark in the encoding header tag if you are using XHTML
Declare Unicode in XHTML
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
...
<head>
If no encoding is declared, then the browser uses the default setting, which in the U.S. is typically Latin-1. In that case many Unicode characters could be displayed incorrectly. Also, older browsers such as Netscape 4.7 may not be able to process the entity codes correctly without the "utf-8" declaration.
Language tags are also suggested so that search engines and screen readers parse the language of a page. These are meta data tags which indicate the page of a language, not devices to trigger translation. Visit the Language Tag page to view information on where to insert it.
