Wiktionary:About Fula

Fula (also known as Fulani, Fulfulde, Pular and Pulaar) is a language or macrolanguage (sometimes considered a group of very closely related languages) spoken mainly in the Sahel of West Africa, but also in central Africa. Its speakers maintain a significant cultural and linguistic unity, but the range over which they have spread and influences of diverse other peoples with whom they interact has led to diversity.

Ethnologue and ISO 639-3 have focused on the distinctions among varieties of Fula, while acknowledging its unified aspects, and given the various dialects of Fula the following codes, arranged roughly from east to west:

• Adamawa Fulfulde, fub
• Central-Eastern Niger Fulfulde, fuq
• Western Niger Fulfulde, fuh
• Nigerian Fulfulde, fuv
• Borgu Fulfulde, fue
• Bagirmi Fulfulde, fui
• Maasina Fulfulde, ffm
• Pulaar, fuc
• Pular, fuf

On Wiktionary, Fula is treated as a single language, and the (ISO) code ff is used for it.

Vocabulary of Fula

A great deal of the lexicon of Fula is the same or very similar across this range. There are sometimes variations in pronunciation (and spelling conventions of the various countries where it is spoken), as well as different uses of the same words, and words that are different (sometimes reflecting local borrowing).

Orthography

The orthography and spelling conventions for Fula (written in Latin script) are based on standardization that dates back to 1966. There are variations but these are country-based, and not distinctions among the spoken forms. Fula in all current Latin transcriptions uses an extended Latin alphabet.

Fula alphabet (Latin)

When written using the Latin script, Fula uses the following additional special "hooked" characters to distinguish meaningfully different sounds in the language: Ɓ/ɓ, Ɗ/ɗ, Ŋ/ŋ, Ñ/ñ or Ɲ/ɲ, and Ƴ/ƴ. The apostrophe (ʼ) is used as a glottal stop (but never written before an initial vowel). In Nigeria ʼy substitutes ƴ}}, and in Senegal ñ is used instead of ɲ.

Sample Fula alphabet:
a, aa, b, mb, ɓ, c, d, nd, ɗ, e, ee, f, g, ng (or ŋg), h, i, ii, j, nj, k, l, m, n, ŋ, ny (or ñ or ɲ), o, oo, p, r, s, t, u, uu, w, y, ƴ

The digraphs (prenasalized consonants and long vowels) are considered letters.

The letters q, x, z are used in some cases for loan words. In the Pular of Guinea an additional letter, ɠ, is also part of the orthography.

Ajami (Arabic script)

The use of the Arabic script to write Fula is known as Ajami. This usage involved some modifications of letters or character values to represent vowel and consonants found in Fula but not Arabic. It tends to follow some conventions, but since there were no formal standards, these varied more or less by region, and perhaps even individual understanding or choice.

Adlam script

The Adlam script was created in 1989 by the brothers Ibrahima Barry and Abdoulaye Barry. It was added to Unicode in June 2016. It is alphabetic, with several diacritics, and written right-to-left.

Notes on morphology

The language builds its vocabulary on roots and "infixes" (extenders), much like some Nguni languages in Southern Africa. Roots are given their own pages, and indicated as appropriate in etymology of derived nouns, verbs, and modifiers.

There is a system of initial consonant shifts that usually operates between singular and plural forms (except for verbs in the Pular of Futa Jalon). It is also seen in for example the language names (from the root ful-): Fulfulde, Pulaar, and Pular (as well as the poetic Fulaare).