Learn Hardcore Hausa: Uwa ta hana yara fita waje da dare. - Mother forbade the children to go outside at night.

In Hausa, these subject markers cover both person/gender and aspect (a bit like a combined pronoun + tense/aspect marker). Some common ones in the perfective are:

na – I
ka – you (masc. sg.)
ki – you (fem. sg.)
ya – he / it (masc.)
ta – she / it (fem.)
muka – we (emphatic past)
suka – they (emphatic past), etc.

In this sentence:

Uwa is the noun “mother”.
ta agrees with uwa (which is feminine), so you get Uwa ta hana… = The mother (she) forbade…

You could, in the right context, drop Uwa and just say Ta hana yara fita waje da dare = She forbade the children from going outside at night, if it’s already clear who “she” is.

Is ta hana strictly past tense, or can it also mean a current rule like “she doesn’t allow”?

Formally, ta hana is perfective aspect, which most often corresponds to simple past or “has done”:

Uwa ta hana… – The mother forbade / has forbidden…

However, with verbs like hana (forbid/prevent), a perfective can also be understood as a current state resulting from a past action, i.e. she has forbidden them (and that prohibition still stands). So depending on context, it can be taken as:

The mother has forbidden the children to go outside at night.
(implying this is now the rule)

If you want to clearly express an ongoing or habitual rule, you might hear forms like:

Uwa na hana yara fita waje da dare. – The mother (usually) forbids the children from going outside at night.
Uwa tana hana yara fita waje da dare. – The mother is (in the habit of) forbidding / is currently forbidding the children from going out at night.

But ta hana is very natural for a rule that has been set (and is still in effect).

How does hana work syntactically? Where is the “from” as in “forbid someone from doing something”?

In Hausa, hana usually follows this pattern:

hana + [person/people] + [verbal noun / verb phrase]

So in this sentence:

hana – forbid
yara – the ones being forbidden (children)
fita waje da dare – the action they are forbidden to do (go outside at night)

There is no separate word corresponding to English from. The construction itself carries that meaning:

Uwa ta hana yara fita waje da dare.
= The mother forbade the children from going outside at night.

You can also see hana used with a subject pronoun before the verb:

An hana ni fita. – I have been forbidden from going out.
Sun hana shi zuwa. – They forbade him from going / They stopped him from going.

So hana directly takes the person and then the action; English from is implicit in the structure.

What exactly is fita here? Is it an infinitive, a noun, or a verb?

fita here is a verbal noun (gerund-like form) of the verb fità (“to go out, to exit”).

Verb (finite): Ya fita. – He went out.
Verbal noun: fita – going out, the act of going out.

After hana, Hausa prefers this verbal-noun form:

hana yara fita – forbid children (from) going out
hana yara gudu – forbid children (from) running

So in Uwa ta hana yara fita waje da dare, fita is functioning roughly like English going out.

Why do we have both fita and waje? Isn’t that like saying “go out outside”?

It does look redundant from an English perspective, but in Hausa this is very natural.

fita – going out / to go out (movement out of an enclosed space or place)
waje – outside, outdoors (also “place” in other contexts)

Together, fita waje means something like:

go out (to the) outside, i.e. go outside, go outdoors.

The pattern [motion verb] + waje is common and simply makes the destination explicit:

Na fita waje. – I went outside.
Kada ka fita waje. – Don’t go outside.

So fita waje is the natural way to say go (out) outside, and it doesn’t feel redundant to Hausa speakers.

What does da dare mean exactly, and why is da used here?

da dare is a fixed type of time expression meaning at night / in the night.

da – literally “with/and”, but used in many set expressions
dare – night

Hausa often uses da in expressions of time:

da safe – in the morning
da rana – in the daytime / in the afternoon
da yamma – in the evening
da dare – at night

So fita waje da dare is “go outside at night.”
The da here is not easily translated word-for-word; it’s just part of the normal way to talk about times of day.

What is the grammatical role of yara in this sentence?

yara (children) is the direct object (the people being affected by hana):

Uwa – subject (the one doing the forbidding)
ta hana – verb phrase (she forbade)
yara – direct object (those who are forbidden)
fita waje da dare – object complement / verb complement (what they are forbidden to do)

So structurally:

Uwa (subject)
ta hana (verb)
yara (object: the forbidden ones)
fita waje da dare (the forbidden action).

Can you say Uwa ta hana yara su fita waje da dare? Is that wrong?

You can hear both patterns, and the version with su is not wrong, though it slightly changes the structure.

Uwa ta hana yara fita waje da dare.
- yara is the object of hana.
- fita waje da dare is a verbal-noun phrase specifying the action.
Uwa ta hana yara su fita waje da dare.
- yara is still the object of hana.
- su fita waje da dare is more like a full clause (they go outside at night) embedded as what is being forbidden; su is a subject pronoun agreeing with yara.

The first version (hana yara fita…) is more compact and very typical when using hana with verbal nouns. The su-version is also acceptable and may feel a bit more explicit (literally: “she forbade the children that they go out at night”).

Where are words like “the” and “their”? Why does Uwa ta hana yara… cover all that?

Hausa does not use definite and indefinite articles like English the or a/an.

uwa can mean a mother, the mother, or their mother, depending entirely on context.
yara can mean children, the children, her children, etc., again depending on context.

So:

Uwa ta hana yara fita waje da dare.
can be interpreted in natural English as:
- The mother forbade the children to go outside at night.
- Their mother forbade them to go outside at night.
  depending on what is known in the conversation.

If you need to be explicit, Hausa can add possessive forms:

Uwar su ta hana su fita waje da dare. – Their mother forbade them from going outside at night.

Can the time expression da dare or something else move to the beginning of the sentence?

Yes, Hausa can front time expressions and some other adverbials for emphasis or to set the scene, similar to English.

For example:

Da dare, uwa ta hana yara fita waje.
– At night, the mother forbade the children to go outside.

This is perfectly acceptable. The most common neutral order, though, is still:

Uwa ta hana yara fita waje da dare.

Placing da dare in the middle, for example:

?Uwa ta hana yara da dare fita waje.

is less natural; time expressions usually go at the beginning or end of the clause, not between object and its verb complement.