Abstract
In Hausa communicative situations, Kunya, face and politeness plays a vital role, this has interrelationship with what Brown and Levinson (1987) postulate in their work on politeness, which state that some communicative acts intrinsically threaten speaker’s (S’s) and hearer’s (H’s) face. Therefore, a speaker (S) when performing that face threaten acts (FTAs) uses some strategies to minimize face threat that his utterance may result to. The aim of this paper is to investigate the concepts of Kunya, Face and Politeness in Hausa Language and its effects in communication on peaceful co-existence among individuals, as correlates to sustainable and harmonious development. The research findings indicate that those concepts were employed by native speakers of Hausa in communicative situations. Hausa language communication cannot be fully understood without recognizing the intricate roles of kunya, face, and politeness.
Keywords: Hausa language, kunya, face, politeness, pragmatics, communication, sustainable development.
