Breakdown of Nama, kifi da kayan miya waɗanda na saya jiya suna cikin ɗakin girki.
Questions & Answers about Nama, kifi da kayan miya waɗanda na saya jiya suna cikin ɗakin girki.
Waɗanda is a relative pronoun meaning roughly “which / that (plural)”.
It links the noun phrase “nama, kifi da kayan miya” with the relative clause “na saya jiya”:
- Nama, kifi da kayan miya – meat, fish and ingredients
- waɗanda – which / that (referring back to all of them)
- na saya jiya – I bought yesterday
So the whole phrase is: “the meat, fish and ingredients which I bought yesterday …”
Key point:
- waɗanda is the plural form. It’s used because we are talking about more than one thing (meat + fish + ingredients together).
Hausa has different relative pronouns depending on gender and number:
- wanda – “who/that/which” (masculine singular)
- wadda – “who/that/which” (feminine singular)
- waɗanda – “who/that/which” (plural, for any gender or things)
In this sentence, the relative pronoun refers to all three items together: nama, kifi da kayan miya, so the reference is plural.
That’s why waɗanda (plural) is used instead of wanda or wadda (singular).
In na saya jiya, the na is a subject pronoun clitic meaning “I” in the perfective (completed) aspect.
So:
- na saya = “I bought”
- na = “I” (subject, perfective)
- saya = “to buy”
Hausa usually doesn’t say ni na saya here; na alone is enough to show “I (did it)” in a completed past action.
Compare:
- Na saya jiya. – I bought (it) yesterday.
- Ina saye. – I am buying / I am in the process of buying. (imperfective / progressive)
Suna is the 3rd person plural form of the verb to be (in a place)/to exist in this context:
- yana – he/it (masc.) is
- tana – she/it (fem.) is
- suna – they are
The subject here is effectively plural:
Nama, kifi da kayan miya waɗanda na saya jiya → these all together are the subject, so the verb must agree in number:
- … suna cikin ɗakin girki. – they are in the kitchen.
If the subject were just one item, e.g. Nama da na saya jiya, you would use yana instead:
- Nama da na saya jiya yana cikin ɗakin girki. – The meat I bought yesterday is in the kitchen.
Grammatically, they are treated as a plural group:
- There are three coordinated nouns joined by da (“and”).
- The relative pronoun waɗanda is plural.
- The verb suna is plural.
So Hausa is seeing: [meat + fish + ingredients] = “they”, not three separate “it”s.
Kayan miya is a common expression meaning “(soup) ingredients / cooking spices and additives” – things you add to stew/sauce (tomatoes, onions, seasoning, etc.).
Breakdown:
- kaya – “things, goods, belongings” (already plural in meaning)
- -n – genitive/possessive linker (like “of”)
- miya – “soup, stew, sauce”
So:
- kayan miya = “things of soup/stew” → the things you use to make stew → ingredients.
Because kaya is inherently plural (“things”), kayan miya is also understood as plural, which fits nicely with waɗanda and suna being plural.
Ɗakin girki is literally “room of cooking”, which is how Hausa expresses “kitchen”.
Breakdown:
- ɗaki – “room”
- -n – genitive/possessive linker (“of”)
- girki – “cooking”
So:
- ɗaki + -n + girki → ɗakin girki = “room of cooking” → kitchen.
This -n linker is very common in Hausa for noun + noun combinations expressing possession or description:
- gidan malam – teacher’s house (house of the teacher)
- motar babana – my father’s car (car of my father)
Cikin means “inside / in the interior of”.
In suna cikin ɗakin girki:
- suna – they are
- cikin – inside (of)
- ɗakin girki – the kitchen
So the meaning is “they are inside the kitchen”.
Difference:
- a ɗakin girki – in/at the kitchen (more general location)
- cikin ɗakin girki – inside the kitchen, emphasizing being inside the room, not just at the doorway or at the kitchen area.
You can also see:
- a cikin ɗakin girki – literally “in the inside of the kitchen”; a cikin is very common and a bit more explicit.
Jiya is fairly flexible, but some positions sound more natural than others.
The most usual place here is after the verb in the relative clause:
- … waɗanda na saya jiya suna cikin ɗakin girki. – “… which I bought yesterday are in the kitchen.”
You could also put jiya at the very start if you want to set the time frame:
- Jiya na saya nama, kifi da kayan miya; yanzu suna cikin ɗakin girki. – Yesterday I bought meat, fish and ingredients; now they are in the kitchen.
Placing jiya before na inside the relative clause (waɗanda jiya na saya…) is possible but usually less natural in everyday speech; it tends to sound more marked or emphatic.
By default, in Hausa, the relative pronoun waɗanda after a list like this is understood to refer to the whole list, not just the last item.
So:
- Nama, kifi da kayan miya waɗanda na saya jiya… is understood as:
- “The meat, fish and ingredients which I bought yesterday …”
If you wanted to say that only the ingredients were bought yesterday, you would usually restructure, for example:
- Nama da kifi suna nan, amma kayan miya da na saya jiya suna cikin ɗakin girki. – The meat and fish are here, but the ingredients that I bought yesterday are in the kitchen.
So in the original sentence, the natural reading is that all three were bought yesterday.
Hausa normally doesn’t use articles like “a” or “the”. Definiteness is shown by:
- Context
- The presence of a relative clause, possessive, or other specifying phrase
Here we have:
- waɗanda na saya jiya – “which I bought yesterday”
This relative clause specifies exactly which items we’re talking about, so in English we translate them as “the meat, (the) fish and (the) ingredients”, not “some meat…”.
So even without a word for “the”, the structure makes these nouns definite.
The Hausa ɗ represents an implosive d-sound, made by slightly sucking in air while voicing a d.
- d – ordinary d, like in English dog.
- ɗ – implosive; there’s a subtle inward movement of air.
In practice, many learners approximate ɗ as a slightly “heavier” d.
Pronouncing it distinctly helps with meaning, because d and ɗ can distinguish different words in Hausa.