Introduction

This work is a comparative study of the numeric system of two of the most widely spoken languages not only in Nigeria but Africa and the world as a whole. It is to explain the styles adopted by the speakers of both languages in expressing numeral situations. In the early days of some comparison between languages, some scholars had argued that there was such a strong linguistic affinity between Hausa and English numerals so much that the two languages could have common meaning and non- instinctive way of communicating ideas, emotion and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols. This is because any language is fundamentally a series of sounds which become meaningful only when those sounds are grouped together in certain definite arrangements (Olaye, 1982). Besides, just as languages must name things and talk about them, virtually all human languages (English and Hausa inclusive) count things. By this token, numeration is somewhat a universal phenomenon. Both English and Hausa languages may need little or no introduction because they are both languages of wider communication.