Fulfulde

Fulfulde is the language of the Fulani (Fulɓe) people, spread in a broad belt across the West African Sahel and Sudan savanna from Senegal and Guinea in the west through Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and Nigeria to Cameroon, Chad, the Central African Republic and Sudan in the east, making it one of the most geographically widespread languages in Africa rather than a language confined to Nigeria. In Nigeria it is spoken by both settled and nomadic pastoralist Fulani communities across the north, and functions regionally as a language of cattle-rearing culture, Islamic scholarship and, historically, the Sokoto Caliphate. It has significant dialect variation across its range, with Sokoto and Adamawa varieties among the main forms spoken in Nigeria, and dialects across the wider Fula-speaking zone can differ enough to affect mutual intelligibility. Fulfulde is used in some regional radio broadcasting and in Islamic and literacy education in parts of northern Nigeria, though it has less presence in national television and film than Hausa, Yorùbá or Igbo. It is generally not an official national medium of instruction, but is used in early primary schooling in some areas alongside Hausa.

Fulfulde is written in a Latin-based orthography, standardised for Nigeria with support from linguistic and literacy bodies working across Fulfulde-speaking countries, using letters such as ƴ and implosive ɓ and ɗ to capture sounds not present in English. As with Hausa, an older tradition of writing Fulfulde in ajami, an adapted Arabic script, exists from the era of Islamic scholarship and the Sokoto Caliphate, and continues in some religious and traditional contexts. Because Fulfulde is spoken across many countries with different colonial and administrative histories, orthographic conventions vary somewhat between Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and other countries, and full standardisation across the whole Fulfulde-speaking area has not been achieved.