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Hausa is the official language of northern Nigeria and is used throughout much of western Africa as a trade language. There are over 22 million native speakers of Hausa and over 16 million using it as a second language. These groups are spread throughout Nigeria, Niger, Ghana, Cameroon, the Sudan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Libya. The Hausa literary language is marked by heavy borrowing of religious and technological terms from Arabic. Indeed, Hausa was written using an alphabet based on Arabic until the early part of the twentieth century when it switched to a Latin based alphabet.