Kanuri language

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Kanuri
Spoken in:	Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Cameroon
Region:	West Africa
Total speakers:	4 million
Language family:	Nilo-Saharan Saharan Western Kanuri
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	`kr`
ISO 639-2:	`kau`
ISO 639-3:	variously: `kau` — Kanuri (generic) `knc` — Central Kanuri `kby` — Manga Kanuri `krt` — Tumari Kanuri `bms` — Bilma Kanuri `kbl` — Kanembu
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key.

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.

1 Geographic distribution
2 Dialects or languages
3 Written Kanuri
- 3.1 Alphabet
4 External links
5 Sources

[edit] Geographic distribution

Kanuri is spoken mainly in lowlands of the Lake Chad basin, with speakers in Cameroon, Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Sudan.

[edit] 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:

Central Kanuri
Manga Kanuri
Tumari Kanuri
Kanembu

SIL considers "Kanuri" a "macrolanguage" grouping the first three.

[edit] Written Kanuri

Kanuri has been written using the Ajami Arabic script, mainly in religious or court contexts, for at least four hundred years[1]. More recently, it is also sometimes written in a modified Latin script.