A Preliminary Hausa Bird Lexicon
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A Preliminary Hausa Bird Lexicon Version 1.1 By Adam Manvell November, 2012 Acknowledgements I would like to extend a warm thanks to several people who have been instrumental in the completion of this stop-start ten year endeavour. The patience of Mai Daji Salihou and Oumar Tiousso Sanda in drawing up a list of local bird names was essential for initiating this work. Jack Tocco's kind assistance in transcribing and translating these names encouraged me to look for comparative data. Isa Dutse and Roger Blench's list of common bird names around the Hadejia-Nguru wetlands gratefully posted on Roger's website indicated there were some interesting similarities and differences to explore across Hausaland. The real breakthrough however came with my serendipitous contact with Joyce Lowe who very kindly shared with me the Browns' unpublished list of bird names from Katsina. In getting down to organising the lexicon around a robust bird list, Ron Demey provided vital assistance with updating old nomenclature and Joost Brouwer has provided constant support not least through the wonderful Niger Bird DataBase (http://www.nibdab.org/db/) that he set up. Much appreciated conversations with David Ballance and email exchanges with Nancy Jacobs have helped stimulate my interest in the historical nature of the sources that I have drawn upon. I am most grateful to all the above and others whom have answered my correspondence over the years, most of whom I have acknowledge through pers. comms. where relevant in the text. Finally I would like to thank Bob Gosford and Fleur Ng'weno for accepting my presentation on some reflections I had via this work at the ethno-ornithology session of the 13th Congress of the International Society of Ethnobiology in Montpellier in May 2012. This not only helped force me to up my pace, but the opportunity to participate in such a rich forum was highly stimulating and I am indebted to the organisers and other participants in the session for this. As a final word, I should add that though I alone remain responsible for all errors and omissions in this work, it is just a preliminary piece and I would like to encourage all corrections, suggestions and additions to make it richer. Front Cover: The Hoopoe image is a scan of a print which bears no signature and was kindly given to me by David Ballance who cannot recall its origins. I assume it is out of copyright, but will happily make amendments if any information on it is forthcoming. Table of Contents Introduction 1. The Hausa Language and Hausaland 1 2. The Avifauna of Hausaland 4 3. The Lexicon Sources 10 4. The Lexicon 25 5. Additional Lexical Material 75 6. Preliminary Analysis 81 7. Further Research Directions 97 References 101 Appendix 1: Species Excluded from the Hausaland List 109 Appendix 2: Pan-Hausaland Bird List 111 Appendix 3: Biome Restricted Species in Hausaland 115 Appendix 4: Species Name Counts 117 Appendix 5: Name Comparison for Three Villages 125 Figures, Tables & Boxes Figure 1: Hausaland Showing some Key Locations 2 Figure 2: Vegetation Zones of Hausaland after White (1983) 5 Figure 3: Urban Centres, Protected Areas and Major Wetlands & Rivers in Hausaland 7 Figure 4: Number of Sources per Named Species in Lexicon 81 Figure 5: Residential Categories of Named and Unnamed Species 82 Figure 6: Species and Name Comparison Between Three Localities 85 Figure 7: Quarter Degree Grid Cells in and around Hausaland 99 Table 1: Residency Status of Hausaland Bird Species 4 Table 2: Summary of Data from the 12 Lexicon Sources 24 Table 3: The Major Bird Families or Groups of Unnamed Species 82 Table 4: Most Consistent Bird Names in the Lexicon 84 Table 5: Examples of Colour Referents in Hausa Bird Names 88 Table 6: Examples of Distinct Names for Male and Female Birds 89 Table 7: Potential Onomatopes in the Lexicon 95 Box 1: Examples of Habitat Associations in Bird Names 90 Box 2: Examples of Plant Associations in Bird Names 92 Box 3: Some Suggested Key Research Questions 98 Introduction The simple intention of this lexicon is to unite 12 sources of Hausa bird names, some of them unpublished or difficult to find, that have been collected in various ways in different locations from approximately 1910 to 2002. In doing so, it is hoped that a foundation of sorts will be established to enable closer examination of issues such as how birds get named by Hausa speakers, how such knowledge is transmitted and how it may vary and/or remain stable across and between different speech communities. To achieve this ambition it is important to couple ornithological and linguistic knowledge. Currently we have more knowledge—though far from complete—about the distribution of birds in time and space across the core Hausa-speaking region than we do about linguistic variation within this area. Therefore, the primary task of this lexicon is to unite two different approaches to bird-naming. In this first version, this will be done by establishing a list of birds recorded in 'Hausaland' followed by the Hausa names that have been ascribed to them. This list could be reversed, but several factors combine to suggest this would be overly premature at the moment: • The orthography used by the twelve sources is variable and requires standardisation • Several ascriptions require verification. Many names were collected at the beginning of the twentieth century when ornithological knowledge of the region was still nascent, nomenclature had not been standardised and bird identification tools such as fieldguides, prismatic optics and bird sound recordings were either not available or not of the standard they are today. For several sources there is simply no indication as to how the assignment of a name to one or several species was made. Furthermore, one of the major sources of names has left us with several outstanding identifications • The coverage of bird-name recording is very patchy, and for several sources, there is no means of identifying where they were collected It is hoped that dissemination of this version may permit some of these weaknesses to be addressed. The lexicon itself (Chapter 4) is presented after an introduction to the Hausa language and Hausaland (Chapter 1), its avifuana (Chapter 2) and the sources from which it has been derived (Chapter 3). Following this, a compilation of bird names that have not been identified to the species level is presented (Chapter 5) which may one day make it into future versions of the lexicon. Some preliminary analysis is then made (Chapter 6) before signing off (Chapter 7) with some reflections on opportunities and methods to gain further insights into the richness and diversity of Hausa bird names and associated ornithological knowledge. 1. The Hausa Language and Hausaland There are more first-language speakers of Hausa than any other language in Sub-Saharan Africa, with perhaps as many as 40 million people for whom it is their mother tongue (Jagger, 2010)1. Hausa is also a significant lingua-franca with perhaps as many as half this figure who only speak Hausa as a second language. These figures combined make Hausa the second most widely spoken language of Sub-Saharan Africa after Swahili. The majority of first-language Hausa speakers live in northern Nigeria and southern Niger in an area that has come to be known as Hausaland. This is a remarkably uniform language area in comparison to the linguistic complexity of the so-called 'Middle Belt' to the south, Borgou to the west and the Yobe language area to the east. Whereas these areas are characterised by numerous languages, many with small numbers of speakers within restricted areas, Hausaland (see Figure 1) shows linguistic continuity across an area about the size of Germany. Linguistic cartography involves simplification in defining language boundaries and there are of course non-Hausa speaking populations living within Hausaland. Nothing is known about the data sources and means of creating the maps behind Figure 1 apart from their origin in the 2009 Ethnologue edition, a date which may not reflect the age of the data. The map is therefore best treated as a recent, but undated snapshot of the approximate indication of where most first-language Hausa speakers live. With population growth and mobility the situation is always likely to change, but what is particularly interesting about the Hausa language is that it is an expanding one and this has been the case for several centuries. The reasons why people have adopted Hausa language and/or culture, and continue to do so, are complex. For the reader interested in this topic, Haour & Rossi (2010) provide a fascinating collection of papers on various aspects of Hausaisation, the process of becoming Hausa. A critical point to be aware of is that language and identity are not inseparable and speakers of Hausa as a first language may or may not self-identify with Hausa as an ethnic label. Awareness of Hausaisation processes and their different tempos across Hausaland and its margins is also helpful for understanding why there may, or may not be, lexical differences in Hausa names for birds. Hausa is said to show “only moderate dialectical fragmentation” (Sutton, 2010: 279) and various factors may lie behind this, such as the advantages of mutual intelligibility for trade, the influence of the Sokoto Caliphate over much of Hausaland in the nineteenth century as well as more modern factors of standardisation through media and education. However, dialect differences do not appear to have been examined across Hausaland in relation to a vocabulary that a priori is marginal in becoming Hausa. 1 Language populations are always difficult to quantify, especially with lingua-francas and lower figures for Hausa are also in use.