Everything about Kanuri Language totally explained
Kanuri is a dialect continuum spoken by approximately 4 million people in
Nigeria,
Niger,
Chad and
Cameroon, as well as small minorities in southern
Libya and by a diaspora in
Sudan. It belongs to the Western
Saharan subphylum of
Nilo-Saharan. Kanuri is the language associated with the
Kanem and
Bornu empires which dominated the
Lake Chad region for a thousand years.
The basic word order of Kanuri sentences is
Subject Object Verb. It is typologically unusual in simultaneously having
postpositions and post-nominal modifiers - for example, "Bintu's pot" would be expressed as
nje Bintu-be, "pot Bintu-of".
Kanuri has three tones: high, low, and falling. It has an extensive system of consonant weakening (for example,
sa- "they" +
-buna "have eaten" >
za-wuna "they have eaten".
Traditionally a local
lingua franca, its usage has declined in recent decades.
Most first-language speakers speak
Hausa or
Arabic as a second language.
Geographic distribution
Kanuri is spoken mainly in lowlands of the
Lake Chad basin, with speakers in
Cameroon,
Chad,
Niger,
Nigeria and
Sudan.
Dialects or languages
The
Ethnologue divides Kanuri into the following languages, while many linguists (eg Cyffer 1998) regard them as dialects of a single language:
SIL considers "Kanuri" a "
macrolanguage" grouping the first three.
Written Kanuri
Kanuri has been written using the
Ajami Arabic script, mainly in religious or court contexts, for at least four hundred years
(External Link
). More recently, it's also sometimes written in a modified
Latin script.
Alphabet
a b c d e ǝ f g h i j k l m n ny o p r ɍ s sh t u w y z
Further Information
Get more info on 'Kanuri Language'.
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