Hausa is a major world language, spoken as a mother tongue by more than 30 million people in northern Nigeria and southern parts of Niger, in addition to diaspora communities of traders, Muslim scholars and immigrants in urban areas of West Africa, for example southern Nigeria, Ghana and Togo, and the Blue Nile province of the Sudan. It is also widely spoken as a second language and has expanded rapidly as a lingua franca. Hausa is a member of the Chadic language family which, together with Semetic, Cushitic, Omotic, Berber and Ancient Egyptian, is a co-ordinate branch of the Afroasiatic phylum. This comprehensive reference grammar provides a detailed and up-to-date description of the core structural properties of the language in theory-neutral terms, thus guaranteeing its ongoing accessibility to researchers in linguistic typology and universals.