Adamawa Fulfulde

It is spoken mainly in Cameroon but also by significant communities residing in Nigeria, Chad, and Sudan by Fulani pastoralists across the Sahel. It is also known as Eastern Fulfulde and by various other names including Boulbe, Dzemay, Fula, Fulfulde, Mbororo, Palata, Peul etc.

Adamawa Fulfulde was originally brought to Cameroon in the early parts of the 19th century during a religious war (Jihad) that was launched by Usman dan Fodio from Northern Nigeria. It was originally used as a trade language, however since the arrival of Christian missionaries in the latter half of the 19th century in 1885 to the area in what is now Northern Cameroon and Northern Nigeria, Adamawa Fulfulde became a language widely used in churches and is now used as a Language Of Wider Communication (LWC) in 3 regions of Cameroon.

It is a Atlantic language that belongs to the Niger-Congo language family. The speakers of the language are the Fulani people. The language itself is divided into a number of sub-dialects: Maroua, Garoua, Ngaondéré, Kambariire, Mbororoore, Bilkiri and Gombe.

In Sudan, the language is spoken mainly in Blue Nile, Gedaref, and Sennar states with some communities of speakers also found in North Kordofan and South Kordofan states. In South Sudan, it is spoken in Western Bahr el Ghazal state by Ambororo cattle herders. In Chad, it is spoken in Lac Léré Department in the Mayo-Kebbi Ouest Region. In Nigeria, it is spoken in Adamawa and Taraba states. While in Cameroon the language is widespread across the Far North and Northern regions of the country.

Adamawa Fulfulde has the Morphological imperative in which words are divided into second singular and second plural, and like many of the languages of the Fula dialect continuum and Niger-Congo language family, Adamawa Fulfulde has a system of noun classes and marks plurals by mutating the initial consonant of a word. The word order for Adamawa Fulfulde is SOV (Subject-Object-Verb).

Adamawa Fulfulde is mostly written in a modified Arabic script, in the tradition of Ajami script, that it shares with many other languages such as Hausa language, and many other languages in Sub-Sahara Africa. Writing Fulfulde with Arabic script has a long tradition and old manuscripts are found in all of West Africa. While traditionally, the Arabic alphabet was used in its unmodified original 28-character state, and thus no distinction was made between similar sounds, such as [b]/[mb]/[ɓ], [d]/[nd], or [p]/[f], today, despite a lack of governmental endorsement in many instances, these letters and writing conventions have been standardized and agreed upon.

Latin alphabet is also used for writing of Adamawa. The usage of Latin is a lot more recent, only coming to existence with the arrival of European Christian. Still, in Cameroon, Arabic alphabet remains more popular for writing of Adamawa Fulfulde than Latin.

Adamawa Fulfulde Ajami Alphabet

The Adamawa Fulfulde Ajami Alphabet is the result of many decades of efforts to standardize, starting from the 1960s. By the 1990s, the orthography was well established. In 1998, at the JCMWA/MICCAO conference in Ngaoundéré, Cameroon, over 100 representatives from 14 West African countries agreed that this orthography would be a good standard for writing the Fulfulde language with Arabic script.

The alphabet consists of 33 basic letters, 28 plus hamaza from Arabic, and 4 are new letters created for use in Fulfulde. 10 of the Arabic letters are only used for writing Arabic loanwords, and have no use for writing indigenous Fulfulde words.

Prenasalized consonants

In Adamawa Fulfulde, there are 4 prenasalized consonants. Prenasalized consonants are written as a digraph (combination of two consonants). The first letter of the digraph representing a prenasalized consonant cannot take any diacritic, including zero-vowel diacritic sukun '◌ْ‎'.

Vowels and diacritics

Like other languages that have historically been written within what's known as the Ajami tradition, there is a full relaince on diacritics for writing vowels. All vowels are written with diacritics. In Arabic there are only three diacritics, which represent [a] '◌َ‎', [u] [i] '◌ُ‎', and [i] '◌ِ‎'. The general tradition is that when there are vowels that don't exist in Arabic, new diacritics are created. In Adamawa Fulfulde these include the Quranic imāla '◌ٜ‎' for vowel [e], and a special diacritic '◌ٛ‎' for vowel [o].

Unlike Arabic orthography, or other Arabic-derived scripts, in Ajami tradition, all diacritics are written. Even letters that don't have any vowels, are written with a zero-vowel/sukun '◌ْ‎' diacritic. Only in the following instances are letters written without a diacritic:

Vowels are lengthened by combining the diacritic with a follow-up letter, just as is the tradition in Arabic. These follow-up letters are written without a diacritic.
Letters miimi 'مـ‎' and nuunu 'نـ‎' can be part of a digraph representing prenasalized consonants. In these instances, these two letters are written without a diacritic.

Adamawa Fulfulde Latin Alphabet

Passage from the Bible, Book of Acts, Chapter 9, verses 4 and 5: