Hausa is primarily spoken in Nigeria and Niger. It is also widely used as a lingua franca for communication between speakers of other languages in West Africa. Hausa is a member of the Chadic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family.
Hausa is a tonal language that also distinguishes between long and short vowel sounds. In some dictionaries and language references, tones and vowel length may be marked with various diacritics over vowels. However, those diacritic marks are not used in the everyday written form of the language. Therefore, in most Hausa lessons, you will not need to type special characters. You can type in Hausa the same way you would type in English.
As you work with your Hausa lessons, pay special attention to the tones used by the native speakers when they pronounce each word. Different tones can change a word's meaning. Listen to words as many times as you need to be able to recognize their tones.