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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".
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.
Geographic distribution
Kanuri is spoken mainly in lowlands of the Lake Chad basin, with speakers in Cameroon, Chad, Niger, Nigeria and Sudan. Most speakers speak Hausa or Arabic as a second language. Traditionally a local lingua franca, its usage has declined in recent decades. The Ethnologue divides it into the following languages, while many linguists (eg Cyffer 1998) regard them as dialects of a single language:
Sources
- Ethnologue report for Kanuri
- Norbert Cyffer, A Sketch of Kanuri. Rudiger Koppe Verlag: Koln 1998.
Saharan languages | Languages of Chad | Languages of Nigeria | Languages of Niger | Languages of Cameroon
Kanoureg | Kanuri (Sprache) | Kanuri | Język kanuri | Kanuri
"Kanuri language"