Proceedings of the 3nd International Conference on Hausa Studies: African and European Perspectives Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale” Napoli 5th-6th July, 2010

The 3rd International Conference on Hausa Studies with a theme “Afri-can and Europeans Perspectives in Hausa Linguistics, Literature and Cul-ture” was organized by the Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale”, Italy under the linkage of the agreement with the Department of Nigerian Languages and Linguistics, Bayero University Kano, Nigeria. It was the third Conference after Warsaw (June 2006) and Kano (February 2009), where it was stated that this kind of Conferences should take place alternatively in Kano and in Europe with a periodi-cal rate. The editors stress their wish that this kind of Conference or, using a term less sophisticated, Workshop, would be a sort of regular meeting among European and African scholars dealing with Nigerian languages with a special focus on Hausa. In our daily world linguists dealing with some languages have their own network with their peri-odical occasions of meetings (see: the VIII Afro-Asiatic Congress of 2008 in Naples, the Colloquium on the Chadic Languages of Septem-ber 2011 in Paris, the Mega-Chad Conference scheduled for Septem-ber 2012 always in Naples, etc.), so some scholars thought to extent the Hausa network, created in the eighties in the framework of the Eu-ropean Community Erasmus Program among most of the European universities where Hausa and Sudanic languages were taught, to Hau-saland for a real linkage in the field of teaching and promoting these studies. These meetings should give also the opportunity to young scholars/students to show their researches and to publish in an interna-tional context evident to the Hausa community of researchers. In this respect it seems that this 3rd meeting was quite successful considering the great numbers of papers and the age of some contributors. It was agreed at the Naples meeting that the 4th conference on Afri-can and European Perspectives in Hausa Linguistics, Literature and Culture will take place at Bayero University Kano in 2012.