Kanuri

Saharan is one of the smaller branches of Nilo-Saharan, with Kanuri being by far the largest member. Other Saharan languages include Teda and Daza in Chad and Libya, plus Berti and Zaghawa. The whole family has only a handful of languages and is spread across the south-central Sahara and Lake Chad region. Linguistic relationships within Nilo-Saharan more broadly remain debated among specialists.

The Kanuri homeland is the historical Kanem-Bornu Empire region around Lake Chad — northeastern Nigerian states (Borno, Yobe, Bauchi), eastern Niger (Diffa region), southeastern Chad, and northern Cameroon (Far North region). Kanuri served as a major regional lingua franca and language of Islamic scholarship for centuries before colonial-era and modern political shifts reduced its institutional reach.

Two: Latin (the modern educational and government standard, used in publishing and broadcasting) and Ajami (a Perso-Arabic-based script with substantial Islamic literary tradition stretching back centuries). Ajami Kanuri carries a significant body of religious texts, poetry, and historical chronicles. Modern formal use leans Latin, but Ajami remains active in Islamic education and traditional contexts.

No — Kanuri does not have grammatical gender in the sense of masculine/feminine noun classes. Pronouns and verb agreement don't distinguish gender. The language does mark eight grammatical cases through suffixes, plus elaborate verb morphology that conjugates for person, number, tense, aspect, and several mood distinctions.

The Kanem-Bornu Empire (roughly 8th to 19th centuries) was one of the longest-running African polities, with Kanuri serving as its administrative and scholarly language. Bornu was a major centre of Islamic learning across the Sahel for centuries, and the Ajami Kanuri literary tradition reflects that role. The decline of the empire and colonial-era political restructuring reduced Kanuri's institutional reach but the language remains widely spoken across the Lake Chad region.