Bilma Kanuri is a variety of the
Kanuri language
Kanuri () is a Saharan dialect continuum of the Nilo–Saharan language family spoken by the Kanuri and Kanembu peoples in Nigeria, Niger, Chad and Cameroon, as well as by a diaspora community residing in Sudan.
Background
At the turn of the ...
which is a
Nilo-Saharan
The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of around 210 African languages spoken by somewhere around 70 million speakers, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributari ...
language belonging to the
Saharan branch of the language family. It is spoken in
Niger
Niger, officially the Republic of the Niger, is a landlocked country in West Africa. It is a unitary state Geography of Niger#Political geography, bordered by Libya to the Libya–Niger border, north-east, Chad to the Chad–Niger border, east ...
mainly in the
Agadez Region
Agadez Region is one of the seven regions of Niger. At , it covers more than half of Niger's land area, and is the largest region in the country, as well as the list of the largest country subdivisions by area, largest African state subdivision. ...
by the Bilma Kanuri subgroup, and is named after the town of
Bilma
Bilma is an oasis town and commune in north east Niger with, as of the 2012 census, a total population of 4,016 people.
It lies protected from the desert dunes under the Kaouar Cliffs and is the largest town along the Kaouar escarpment. It ...
. The variety is one of the smaller varieties of
Kanuri in terms of the number of speakers.
Like other varieties of
Kanuri, Bilma Kanuri is agglutinative, where affixes are added to a root word to convey grammatical relationships and meanings. It typically follows a Subject-Object-Verb word order in basic sentence structures. Bilma Kanuri also exhibits vowel harmony, where vowels within a word harmonize or share certain phonetic features.
[Bulakarima, Shettima Umara. 2001. A Study in Kanuri Dialectology: Phonology and Dialectal Distribution in Mowar. Maiduguri, Nigeria: Awwal. iv+189pp. (Publication of 1991 PhD.)]
References
{{Niger-stub
Kanuri language