Hausa–Fulani are people of mixed Hausa and Fulani origin. They are primarily found in the Northern region of Nigeria, most of whom speak a variant of Hausa or Fula or both as their first language.

While some Fulani claim Semitic origins, Hausas are indigenous to West Africa. This suggests that the processes of "Hausaization" in the western Sudan region was probably both cultural and genetic. The Hausa–Fulani identity came into being as a direct result of the migration of Fulani people to Hausaland around the 14th century and their cultural assimilation into the Hausa society. At the beginning of the 19th century, Sheikh Usman dan Fodio led a successful jihad against the Hausa Kingdoms founding a centralized Fulani Empire (anglicized as the Sokoto Caliphate). After the jihad, Dan Fodio encouraged intermarriage between the immigrant Fulani and the conquered Hausa states and locals mainly other Hausa people; in addition, Jobawa, Dambazawa and Sullubawa Fulani clans originating in Futa Tooro migrated to the region and intermarried with the local urban mainly Hausa elite, and were a major factor in the linguistic, cultural and ethnic mixing of the Hausa–Fulani people. As result of this assimilation, Hausa–Fulani form the core and vast majority of the populations of Daura, Zamfara, Kano, Katsina, Zazzau, and Sokoto.

Hausa–Fulanis primarily speak variants of Hausa which form a dialect continuum of more-or-less mutually intelligible regional varieties. Hausa is spoken by over 100 to 150 million people across Africa, making it the most spoken Indigenous African language and the 11th most spoken language in the world. Since the Trans-Saharan trade, Hausa is used as a lingua franca spanning from Agadez deep in the Sahara Desert of Niger to Northern Nigeria, and has many loanwords from Arabic. For centuries, it utilized an Ajami script which served as the basis of the language scholarly tradition. The script was replaced with the Latin orthography of the Boko alphabets, after the British conquered the Sokoto Caliphate.