Kanuri is one of the African languages which was documented rather early. The first known source is a short vocabulary of the 17th century discovered in archives in Paris […] Another source of comparable age is the Kanembu annotations of the Koran. It is estimated that the annotations, called ‘tafsîr’, are dated to the middle of the 17th century. However, no linguistic analysis has been made so far. In 1827 the German Orientalist H.J. Klaproth published a short description of Kanuri grammar. This description is based on data collected by D. Denham, H. Clapperton, and W. Oudney (1831) in the beginning of the 19th century. The most comprehensive work on Kanuri in the 19th century was carried out by Sigismund Wilhelm Koelle. He worked as a missionary among freed and resettled slaves at the famous Fourah Bay College in Freetown, Sierra Leone. The Church Missionary Society (CMS) believed that Kanuri would be, like Hausa, a suitable language for future proselytising work in the Lake Chad area. […] Koelle soon realized that chances of converting Kanuri people to Christianity were very slim. Nevertheless the CMS published Koelle’s works on Kanuri. The traveller Heinrich Barth is another pioneer to mention in connection with Kanuri studies. To his credit not so much the description of Kanuri grammar, but the successful attempt to relate Kanuri with Teda-Daza, a language spoken in the Tibesti mountains (northern Chad) and expanding to the southwest in Niger (Barth 1862). Gustav Nachtigal, who also visited Borno and the central Sahara during his extensive journeys to North and Central Africa (1869-1875), added to the Kanuri/Teda-Daza relation the Berti and Zaghawa languages in the Chad-Sudan borderland. Nachtigal also delimited the ‘Tubu-Kanuri-Baele Group’ from other linguistic affiliations in Africa and proposed that this group should be considered as separate from the other groups (Nachtigal 1879-89, 1871-87). Nachtigal’s nephew, Rudolf Prietze, was evidently encouraged by the achievements of his uncle and also worked on the Kanuri language, specifically the Manga dialect. Prietze never reached the country of the Kanuri-speaking peoples, but he obtained his data in Cairo in the beginning of the 20th century, where he had contact with students from Borno. In several publications he documented specimens of Kanuri oral literary art. A small grammar was published in 1923 by P. Noël. This grammar is of particular interest, because it is based on the Kanuri spoken in Bilma (Niger).

The first professional africanist who studied and described the Kanuri language was Johannes Lukas. He published the first articles in the 1920s and crowned his work by his ‘A Study of the Kanuri Language’ (1937). Lukas also made important contributions to the Teda-Daza language.
Until the time between the 1940s until the 1970s little was published on the Kanuri language, apart from small readers for primary and adult education. In 1974 the ‘Centre for the Study of Nigerian Languages’ (CSNL) of ‘Ahmadu Bello University’ (now ‘Bayero University Kano’) started a special Kanuri research section and set up an office in Maiduguri. In the same year the ‘Kanuri Language Board’ was founded. Special priority was given to the creation of the ‘Standard Kanuri Orthography’ (SKO) and the compilation of a Kanuri-English dictionary. The SKO was introduced in 1975. The manuscript of the ‘Dictionary of the Kanuri Language’ was completed in 1981 and was finally published in 1990 (Hutchison 1977, Cyffer and Hutchison 1990).
While the CSNL’s involvement in Kanuri language research came to an end in 1981, a new centre for Kanuri studies commenced in 1977 at the newly established ‘University of Maiduguri’. The ‘Department of Languages and Linguistics’ became committed to the research and teaching of Kanuri as the major language in its catchment area. Special emphasis was laid on the training of teachers to use the language as a medium of instruction in primary education. In 1977 the Certificate Course in Kanuri Studies was launched. The syllabus contained courses in the use of the Standard Kanuri Orthography, the familiarization with the principles of Kanuri grammar, the genres of oral literature, modern teaching methods and aids, etc. Two years later the ‘B.A. in Kanuri’ was initiated. In the following years the M.A. and finally the Ph.D. programme was added. In 1991 the first degree of Ph.D. .in Kanuri was awarded. A long-term Kanuri Data Bank project was launched in 1992. Extensive linguistic research, translation and literacy work (mainly on the Manga variety) was also carried out by the ‘Church of Christ in Nigeria’ (COCIN), the Université de Niamey and the Summer Institute of Linguistics in Niger
It took several years until Kanuri studies were included in the syllabi of advanced teacher training institutions. Now Departments of Kanuri exists at the ‘Kashim Ibrahim College of Education’ (Maiduguri) and the ‘College of Education’ (Gashua).

Extract from “A Survey of the Kanuri Language” p. 18-21, Cyffer and Geider 1997: 17-66.

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