Hausa’s rich morphology employs prefixes, infixes, and suffixes, the latter with fixed tone melodies. Reduplication is very common. ‘Feminatives’ were created by adding a feminine suffix to words that were already feminine. Plural formation reflects consonant changes such as Klingenheben’s Law and the loss of final nasals. An ongoing drift has been the change of plural nouns into singulars. Similarly one has ‘frozen pluractionals’, i.e., erstwhile pluractionals without simple counterparts. The elaborate ‘grade system’ developed from basic verbs ending in /a/ or /i/ plus synchronically semantically empty CV suffixes and/or an adverb-like extensions such as totality and ventive. Different grades serve as transitivizers and intransitivizers. The ‘efferential’ grade manifests two originally distinct extensions, *-asi and *-da. Singular ethnonyms come from language names, the initial ba- being a reflex of the word ‘mouth’. The plural counterpart with -awa derives from a formative indicating ‘community’. Derivatives indicating agentive, locational, and instrumental are described including ‘pseudo-agentives’, i.e., words with agentive form but without agentive meaning.

This final chapter summarizes the substantive findings spelled out in the book. These involved historical changes in phonology, including major sound laws and the appearance and disappearance of two new diphthongs, morphology, primarily involving gender, plurality in nouns and pluractionality in verbs, and the origin of the verb grade system, and syntax, focusing on significant tenses, e.g. the falling together of the aorist and the subjunctive, and in the total revamping of the indirect object system. It ends by raising unanswered questions, such as: did Old Hausa have two fully functional contrastive Rs?; could reflexives originally have been built on the word for ‘body’ rather than ‘head’?; how did the current Completive TAM pronoun paradigm come to be used as subjects?; what accounts for the large number of body part terms that begin with /ha/?; and if the current efferential grade incorporates two distinct and unrelated suffixes, what would their original difference in meaning and function have been?