Kanuri

Kanuri is spoken mainly in north-eastern Nigeria, especially in Borno and Yobe states, historic heartland of the Kanem-Bornu Empire, and by communities across the border in Niger, Chad and Cameroon. It is a regional lingua franca in parts of the Lake Chad basin and carries strong historical prestige as the language of the centuries-old Kanem-Bornu state, one of the longest-lived polities in West African history. Kanuri belongs to the Saharan branch of Nilo-Saharan, setting it apart linguistically from the Niger-Congo languages of southern and central Nigeria and from Chadic Hausa. It is used in some regional radio broadcasting in Borno and Yobe and taught in some schools in the north-east as a subject, though its use in national media and film is limited compared with the country's three largest languages. Dialect variation exists, with Yerwa (Bornu) Kanuri generally serving as the reference variety. Decades of conflict linked to Boko Haram/ISWAP insurgency in the north-east have disrupted schooling and cultural life in many Kanuri-speaking areas, affecting formal transmission efforts, although the language remains widely spoken at home and in community life.

Kanuri is written today in a Latin-based orthography developed during the colonial and post-colonial periods, adapted to represent its vowel and consonant inventory, including nasal vowels. As with Hausa and Fulfulde, Kanuri also has a long history of being written in ajami, an adapted Arabic script, reflecting its association with Islamic scholarship in the Kanem-Bornu Empire from around the eleventh century onward, one of the oldest written traditions among Nigerian languages. Latin-script Kanuri is used in the limited primers, religious texts and literacy materials produced for the language, though standardisation and published material remain far less extensive than for Hausa.