Linguistics classifies the world's languages into families based on shared ancestry and structural features. Hausa belongs to the Afro-Asiatic language family, specifically to its Chadic branch. The Chadic languages are spoken predominantly in northern Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon, and Hausa is by far the most widely spoken among them, with over 80 million speakers across West and Central Africa.
The Afro-Asiatic family also includes Semitic languages (such as Arabic and Hebrew), Berber languages, Cushitic languages (such as Somali and Oromo), and ancient Egyptian. Hausa shares certain structural features with other Afro-Asiatic languages, including a system of grammatical gender, certain consonant patterns, and aspects of verb morphology.
Indo-European is the family that includes English, French, Hindi, and most European languages - Hausa has no connection to this group. Bantu is a sub-group of the Niger-Congo family and includes languages such as Swahili, Zulu, and Igbo's neighbours, but not Hausa. Niger-Congo is the largest African language family and includes Yoruba and Igbo, but Hausa specifically belongs to the Afro-Asiatic family, not Niger-Congo.
