Hausa

1. A member of a predominantly Muslim people inhabiting northern Nigeria and southern Niger.
2. A Chadic language spoken by the Hausa, widely used as a trade language in West Africa.

[Hausa háusáawáa, pl. of bàháušè, a Hausa.]

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The Hausa are a predominantly Islamic people who inhabit northwestern Nigeria and adjacent areas of the Niger Republic. According to a study by R.A. Shweder and R.A. LeVine on the development of dream concepts among Hausa children, there are stages through which the children proceed in their attempts to understand their dream experiences.

Initially Hausa children believe the events in their dreams to be real occurrences that are visible to others. They treat dream events as if they were intrasomatic stimuli potentially capable of public perception, if one could look through the eyes of the dreamer or open him as in an operation. Hausa adults find this view of dreams inadequate and tell their children that dreams are a kind of vision that gives them access to an external, objective realm of the soul. Hausa children later change their minds about the reality or the externality of these events and view dreams as either mirages or internal perceptions.

At a subsequent stage, dream events are understood to be events that can be experienced only by few people. Finally, when they are about ten years old, Hausa children come to believe the events in their dreams are unreal appearances, located inside their bodies, to which only they have potential perceptual access.

Hausa may refer to:

• the Hausa language
• the Hausa people

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