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 Saharan    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.

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.

Contents 1 Geographic distribution 2 Dialects or languages 3 Written Kanuri 3.1 Alphabet 4 External links 5 Sources 6 Notes

[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.

[edit] Alphabet

a b c d e ǝ^[1] f g h i j k l m n ny o p r ɍ s sh t u w y z

[edit] External links

• PanAfrican L10n page on Kanuri
• Alphabet Kanuri

[edit] Sources

• Ethnologue report for Kanuri
• Norbert Cyffer, A Sketch of Kanuri. Rudiger Koppe Verlag: Koln 1998.
• Documentation for ISO 639 identifier: kau

[edit] Notes

1. ^ According to alphabet kanuri — arrété 213-99 de la République du Niger (Chantal Enguehard - Université de Nantes) the letter schwa used in Kanuri is encoded in Unicode with U+01BB instead of U+0259, and its uppercase is Ǝ U+018E instead of Ə U+018F.