TONE: A DETERMINER OF MEANING IN HAUSA

This paper examines tone as one of the phonological aspect that determines the meaning of lexeme(s) in Hausa language, for an effective and mutual communication. Languages are classified as either tonal or stress-timed languages. Hausa, like many African languages is a tonal language, therefore, tone plays a significant role in Hausa phonology and semantic aspect. Tone in Hausa determines the pronunciation pattern of a given word or an expression as well as the meaning. e.g. Káráá (sound) Kàrà (increase). The tone varies the meaning of these words. The research was conducted by extracting some Hausa lexemes that have same orthographic representation with distinct pronunciation and trace the meaning of the identified lexemes. This paper consists of two parts: The first part is the general introduction which discusses Hausa language and the people from the views of different scholars. The second part discuses and exemplified the used of tone in determining the meaning of word(s). The general observation is that, tone is a very important aspect of Hausa language, because it is used in making variation in the pronunciation and also the meaning of a word or an expression.