Discourse Markers in Hausa Writing: Rules of Word Combination and Separation in Modern Hausa Language

This study examines discourse markers in contemporary Hausa writing, focusing on the orthographic rules governing their combination (hadewa) and separation (rabewa). It aims to document the structural types of markers in use, quantify combined and separated forms, compare usage with codified conventions, and derive evidence-based standardization guidelines. The study is descriptive and qualitative, supported by quantitative frequency analysis, and draws on Schiffrin’s (1987) and Fraser’s (1999) frameworks for identifying discourse markers and Haugen’s (1966) model of language standardization. It plans a purposive sample of twenty to thirty texts across educational, print/broadcast media, literary, and digital domains. This article reports a preliminary corpus of nine texts (two novels, six newspaper articles, and one linguistics textbook) containing 33 coded occurrences. Of 24 occurrences with a determinate orthographic status, 19 (79.2%) are written separated and five (20.8%) combined. Only five occurrences could be checked against a directly verified rule (Sa’id, 2019): three conform and two deviate (both ko da yaushe written fused, in one novel). The remainder await page-level checks against other authorities. The four Educational occurrences are author-constructed examples from a single textbook. The findings are preliminary and do not characterize Hausa writing generally. Separated forms predominate in this small, unbalanced sample. Completing the corpus, especially digital material and educational texts with running prose, and checking the remaining authorities are necessary before standardization guidelines can be proposed.