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:

• Central Kanuri
• Manga Kanuri
• Tumari Kanuri
• Kanembu

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 yearshttp://www.kanuri.net/related_projects2.php?aID=37. More recently, it is also sometimes written in a modified Latin script.

Alphabet

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

External links

• PanAfrican L10n page on Kanuri
• ''Alphabet Kanuri''

Sources

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

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 ? U+018E instead of ? U+018F.