The Bikol language of the Philippines, spoken in the southernmost peninsula of Luzon Island and extending into the island provinces of Catanduanes and Masbate, is presented in this bilingual dictionary. An introduction explains the Bikol alphabet, orthographic representation (including policies adopted in writing Spanish and English loan words), foreign sounds in Bikol, and Bikol phonology. A section on the use of the dictionary outlines affixes, tenses, verbal and nonverbal stress, combined affix forms, the causative series "pa-," "mang-" and "pang-" series, "pang-" as a nominal, "maki-" and "paki-" series, "hing-" series, unintentional action, ability series, "magin," and plural nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The Bikol-English and English-Bikol dictionary sections follow.
Includes general aspects of the language, regional dialects, and changes in the language due to contact with Spanish and English. It has over 20,000 headwords with summaries of some words.
Hausa is one of Africa's single most spoken languages. It is Hausa's general ease of use that has contributed to its becoming so widely used. A member of the Chadic branch of the Afro-Asiatic languages Hausa is spoken as a first language by about 34 million people, and as a second language by about 15 million more. Native speakers of Hausa are mostly to be found in the north of Nigeria and in Niger (where it is an official language), but the language is widely used as a lingua franca in a larger geographic band across sahelian Africa north of the Congo basin, and west of central Sudan. As a lingua-franca, Hausa is especially prevalent in Ghana, used by Hausa traders in zango (Hausa urban districts) in major cities. It is also used by Fulani herdsmen, Dagomba/Gurunsi farmers as a second language, by the official Islamic clergy of the country, and as an inter-ethnic group lingua-franca north and east of all Akan dominated areas. In total, Hausa speakers in Ghana number between 4-7 million of all Hausa-speakers, making it a very handy language to know in the marketplace. Hausa is also used extensively in Cameroon alongside Fulani in the far north and as far south as Gabon. In Central/Northeast Africa, Hausa is used in Chad and Sudan among the Hausa-Fulani communities, and smaller Muslim tribal groups, in and around Khartoum and Kordofan (in addition to Arabic). Two famous Sudanese singers, Fadimatu and Sabrin, occasionally sing in Hausa on the popular Sudanese national television program Nogoum, noting the increasing recognition of the Hausa language in otherwise Arabic-dominated Sudanese society. Hausa is a tonal language which employs two distinct tones, high and low, but doesn't sound as distinctly tonal as other African languages. There are also many special implosive and explosive consonants used in Hausa that may have to be learned by ear, but are completely comprehensible without mastering. Hausa employs a 5 vowel system like Spanish (a, e, i, o, u), and grammar is quite easy to learn. This dictionary contains 10,200 terms in English and Hausa. A guide to English and Hausa pronunciation is also included. It is derived from our Words R Us system.
This Bikol > English lexicon is based on the 200+ language 8,000 entry World Languages Dictionary CD of 2007 which was subsequently lodged in national libraries across the world. The corresponding Chinese lexicon has a vocabulary of 2,429 characters, 95% of which are in the primary group of 3,500 general standard Chinese characters issued by China's Ministry of Education in 2013.
