Fuliiru language
language spoken by the Fuliiru people of the Democratic Republic of Congo
The Fuliiru language (autonym: Kifuliiru; also spelled Fuliru) is a Great Lakes Bantu language spoken by the Fuliru people in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, particularly in areas north and west of Uvira Territory in the South Kivu province. It belongs to the Niger–Congo language family, within the Bantu branch, and is classified among the Shi–Havu subgroup of the Great Lakes Bantu languages. Closely related to Kinyindu, Fuliiru is the primary means of communication for Bafuliiru, with an estimated 400,000 native speakers as of 2012.
It is characterized by its tonal system, agglutinative morphology, and extensive noun class structure. During colonial and postcolonial times, it was often marginalized in favor of Swahili and French.
Phonology
Consonants
The table below gives the consonant set of Fuliiru.
Several sounds change when preceded by a nasal: voiceless sounds become voiced, and /β/ and /h/ are realized as [b].
The phoneme /n/ assimilates to the place of consonants that follow it: it can be realized as [m], [ɱ], [n], [ɲ], or [ŋ].
The phoneme /l/ is realized as [d] after /n/, as [ɾ] after the front vowels /e/ and /i/, and as [l] elsewhere. The phoneme /ɾ/ is likewise realized as [d] after /n/, but as [ɾ] elsewhere.
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This entry incorporates text from “Fuliiru language” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.