Dictionaries of the Yobe Languages

The major project of the Yobe Languages Research Project has been the production of dictionaries for the Chadic languages indigenous to Yobe State. There are seven dictionaries: Bade (Gashua dialect), Bade (Western dialect), Bole, Duwai, Karekare, Ngamo, and Ngizim. Each dictionary contains the following sections:

• Introduction: a brief background on the sources of the information contained in the dictionary, comments on orthography, description the information contained in entries, acknowledgments, a list of Hausa words used in English definitions where English words of appropriate meaning are lacking, abbreviations, and table of contents.
• Language-English-Hausa Dictionary: Entries with headwords in the respective languages, grammatical category (including gender of nouns for languages where gender is relevant and classes of verbs), noun plurals for entries where plurals were collected, verbal nouns of all verbs, English definition(s), and Hausa glosses. The 2009 second editions (see below) have examples of use with English translation, morphological and grammatical information that is not immediately evident from the head entry, and, for some languages, phonological information that is not evident in the head entry alone.
• English-Language Wordlist: A wordlist of English words and Language equivalents. This is meant mainly as an index to the words in the Language-English-Hausa section. There has been no attempt to create a comprehensive list of English words with definitions in the language, and entries contain no information other than an English headword and one or more approximate equivalents in the Language. Where warranted, words from the target language are grouped under a general heading rather than as separate English-Language entries. In particular, there is a single entry for trees, one for grasses, and one for plants that count neither as trees or grasses. There is a single heading for all ideophones. Likewise, “pots”, “mats”, and several other such categories group the relevant words from the language.
• Hausa-Language Wordlist: Like the English-Language Wordlist, this is an index to the Language-English-Hausa Dictionary, with one-to-one Hausa to Language equivalents. The Hausa-Language section is even less comprehensive than the English-Language section. Though all the project participants were fluent speakers of Hausa, none were native speakers, so a Hausa definition was simply omitted where a fairly simple one-word translation was not readily available. Hausa glossing is one of the weaker points of the dictionaries, and one would would like more complete and better verified Hausa glossing. This will be for future generations of users.

First editions of all the dictionaries except that for Duwai were published in 2004. These were really extended wordlists, with no examples of use and little grammatical information other than a grammatical category label, plurals for nouns and adjectives, and verbal nouns for verbs. All the dictionaries except for Bade (Gashua dialect) have been published in second editions in 2009. In addition to being significantly expanded in terms of numbers of head entries, the second editions come closer to being real dictionaries, with more refined English definitions, extensive examples of use, and grammatical and phonological information. Many corrections have been made to the 2004 versions, ranging from typos to outright errors in definitions or headword forms. Unfortunately, given lack of time and resources for the thorough proofreading and checking that would be necessary to eliminate all solecisms, many undoubtedly remain.

All editions of the dictionaries have been published in Potiskum, Yobe State, printed by Ajami Press for local sale and distribution. Print copies are essentially unavailable outside Nigeria, but the downloadable PDF versions are identical in content and formatting.

Download the dictionaries

The links below will download PDF files of the dictionaries. The Language-English-Hausa Dictionaries include the introduction as well as the dictionary itself. The English-Language and Hausa-Language Wordlists are presented as separate files but are paginated continuing from the dictionaries.

Bade(Gashua)-English-Hausa Dictionary (2004 edition) (1.5 MB)

English-Bade (Gashua) Wordlist (372 K)

Hausa-Bade (Gashua) Wordlist (416 K)

Bade(Western)-English-Hausa Dictionary (2nd edition, 2009) (3.2 MB)

English-Bade (Western) Wordlist (724 K)

Hausa-Bade (Western) Wordlist (728 K)

Bole Dictionary 2004

Bole-English-Hausa Dictionary (2nd edition, 2009) (5.1 MB)

English-Bole Wordlist (1 MB)

Hausa-Bole Wordlist (1 MB)

Duwai-English-Hausa Dictionary 2009