Yabanya tana girma.

The young cereal crops are growing.

Breakdown of Yabanya tana girma.

• girma: to grow
• ta: she/it
• yabanya: the young cereal crops

Questions & Answers about Yabanya tana girma.

Why is tana there if Yabanya already tells us the subject?

Because this is a normal Hausa sentence pattern. With a noun subject, Hausa often still uses a matching subject marker after it.

So the structure is:

Yabanya + tana + girma

Here, tana agrees with Yabanya and helps show the ongoing/present action. It is not unnecessary repetition.

Why is it tana and not yana?

Because Yabanya takes feminine singular agreement in Hausa.

Hausa nouns belong to grammatical gender classes, and even things that are not female in real life can still be grammatically feminine. For a feminine singular subject, the usual continuous/imperfective form is tana. A masculine singular subject would normally take yana instead.

Does tana literally mean she is?

Only approximately.

In this sentence, tana carries two ideas at once:

• the subject is 3rd person singular feminine
• the action is ongoing or current

So it often lines up with English she is or it is, but it is not a perfect word-for-word match. Hausa does not need a separate word exactly like English is here.

What exactly is girma in this sentence?