Region Lake Chad | ISO 639-1 kr | |
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Native to Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Cameroon Ethnicity Kanuri (Yerwa Kanuri etc.), Kanembu Native speakers (4.2 million cited 1985–2006) Language family Nilo-Saharan?
Saharan
Western Saharan
Kanuri | ||
Kanuri /kəˈnuːri/ is a dialect continuum spoken by some four million people, as of 1987, 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.
Contents
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" + -buma "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.
Varieties
Ethnologue divides Kanuri into the following languages, while many linguists (e.g. Cyffer 1998) regard them as dialects of a single language. The first three are spoken by ethnic Kanuri and thought by them as dialects of their language.
Written Kanuri
Kanuri has been written using the Ajami Arabic script, mainly in religious or court contexts, for at least four hundred years. More recently, it is also sometimes written in a modified Latin script.
Alphabet
A standardized romanized orthography (known as the Standard Kanuri Orthography in Nigeria) was developed by the Kanuri Research Unit and the Kanuri Language Board. Its elaboration, based on the dialect of Maiduguri, was carried out by the Orthography Committee of the Kanuri Language Board, under the Chairmanship of Abba Sadiq, Waziri of Borno. It was officially approved by the Kanuri Language Board in Maiduguri, Nigeria, in 1975.
Letters used : 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.