Arabic Personal Pronouns and Their Hausa Equivalents: A Contrastive Linguistic Analysis

Contrastive analysis of grammatical categories between Arabic and Hausa provides applied linguistic insights of direct pedagogical value for the large number of Hausa-speaking students learning Arabic as a second or academic language in northern Nigerian schools and universities. This study conducts a systematic contrastive analysis of personal pronouns in Arabic and Hausa, examining categories of person, number, gender, and case in Arabic against the corresponding pronoun systems in Hausa, and identifying points of structural convergence and divergence that are likely to affect Arabic learning for Hausa speakers. Using a desk-based comparative linguistic methodology, the study draws on authoritative Arabic grammatical references and Hausa descriptive linguistics sources published within the last decade to compile comprehensive paradigms of personal pronouns in both languages. Points of positive and negative transfer are identified and illustrated with naturally occurring examples. The study finds that while Hausa and Arabic share the basic person distinction of first, second, and third person pronouns, the Arabic system's additional case distinctions, dual number category, and gender marking in second and third person plural forms represent significant learning challenges for Hausa speakers with no equivalent structures in their mother tongue. Pedagogical materials incorporating explicit contrastive exercises targeting these differences are proposed. Keywords: Contrastive analysis, Arabic pronouns, Hausa, language transfer, Arabic pedagogy.