Fur

Fur is the language of the Fur people of Darfur in western Sudan and the neighbouring Sila region of Chad, centred on the Jebel Marra massif; speakers call themselves Poora and their language Foor'íŋ belé. It forms its own small branch of Nilo-Saharan together with Amdang of Chad and has no close relatives. Nouns mark number by alternating prefixes rather than suffixes — singular d- or n- against plural k-, as in nʉ́ŋɨ́ 'eye' beside kʉ́ŋɨ́ 'eyes' — and the verb system is notorious for allomorphs so divergent that one root can surface in several unrelated-looking shapes. Fur has two tone registers, High (marked with an acute) and Low (left unmarked), and an ATR vowel contrast written with the extra letters ɨ, ʉ and a̱ in the SIL-based Latin orthography developed in the 1990s; where that orthography is unattested for a word, the forms here follow Jakobi's and Beaton's transcriptions. About 790,000 people speak Fur, and although Darfur's wars have displaced much of the population, the language is still passed on to children and is used in radio broadcasting and literacy materials.