Hausa in the 21st Century Internet Environment: From Easy Access to Documentation

The research is geared towards investigation on one hand the extent to which Hausa is found on the internet, and utilizing the internet for documenting Hausa materials on the other. The most active internet search engines (i.e. AOL, Ask, Baidu, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Google, Internet Archive, WolframAlpha, Yandex. and Yahoo) were utilized to determine the number of existing and functioning Hausa websites. The activities and contents of the websites were studied to ascertain if they help matters by providing the needed materials for the ‘Hausa academic world’. The areas and forms of weaknesses of the sites were studied accordingly. It has been observed that the Hausa websites are dominated by several challenges ranging from socio-political to environmental. Finally, suggestions are offered as panaceas for the observed problems, one of which is the need for a collaborative effort between departments and centers for the studies in the Hausa language and the enthusiastic Hausa bloggers for the attainment of common documentation and improvement goals.