Fulah

Across the West African Sahel and beyond — Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria (especially the north and east), Cameroon, Chad, Sudan, and through to the Central African Republic. Fulani communities migrated and pastoralized across this enormous territory over centuries, leaving Fulah-speaking populations everywhere from Atlantic coastlines to inland savannas.

Fulah classifies nouns into more than twenty classes, each marked by a suffix that identifies the class. The class affects agreement on adjectives, demonstratives, and verbs in the surrounding sentence. Classes correlate loosely with semantic categories — humans, animals, liquids, objects, abstract concepts — but the system is highly grammaticalized rather than purely semantic. Learning Fulah well means learning the noun classes.

Linguistically, Fulah varieties form a continuum that some treat as one language with regional dialects and others treat as a cluster of closely related languages. Pulaar (Senegal), Pular (Guinea), Maasina Fulfulde (Mali), Sokoto Fulfulde (northwestern Nigeria), Adamawa Fulfulde (eastern Nigeria, Cameroon), and Borgu Fulfulde all share the core grammar but differ in vocabulary and verb morphology enough that distant varieties may need adjustment to communicate.

Most modern Fulah writing uses the Latin alphabet with extra letters or diacritics for sounds Latin doesn't cover (ɓ, ɗ, ŋ, ƴ). Historically, Fulah has also been written in Ajami, a Perso-Arabic-based script used in Islamic education and traditional Fulfulde poetry. Both scripts remain in active use depending on community and region.

No — Fulah is Niger-Congo, Arabic is Afro-Asiatic. The two language families are unrelated. However, Fulah has borrowed substantial Arabic vocabulary through centuries of Islamic contact and education, and Ajami script ties parts of Fulah literacy to the broader Arabic-script literary world. The grammatical core, including the noun class system, is firmly Niger-Congo.