People of West African origin in Sudan number over a million and a half. Together, West Africans who have become Sudanese nationals and resident non nationals from West Africa make up 6.5 percent of the Sudanese population. In the mid-1970s, West Africans had been estimated at more than 10 percent of the population of the northern provinces. Some were descendants of persons who had arrived five generations or more earlier; others were recent immigrants. Some had come in self-imposed exile, unable to accommodate to the colonial power in their homeland. Others had been pilgrims to Mecca, settling either en route or on their return. Many came over decades in the course of the great dispersion of the nomadic Fulani; others arrived, particularly after World War II, as rural and urban laborers or to take up land as peasant cultivators.

The Fellaata (See also Tekruri)

Nearly 60 percent of people included in the West African category were said to be of Nigerian origin (locally called Borno after the Nigerian emirate that was their homeland). Given Hausa dominance in northern Nigeria and the widespread use of their language there and elsewhere, some non-Hausa might also be called Hausa and describe themselves as such. But the Hausa themselves, particularly those long in Sudan, preferred to be called Takari. Typically, the term applied to the Fulani in Sudan was Fellata, but Sudanese also used that term for other West Africans. The dialect of Fellata Language is called Gombe.

The Fulani nomads were found in many parts of central Sudan from Darfur to the Blue Nile, and they occasionally competed with indigenous populations for pasturage. In Darfur groups of Fulani origin adapted in various ways to the presence of the Baqqara tribes. Some retained all aspects of their culture and language. A few had become much like Baqqara in language and in other respects, although they tended to retain their own breeds of cattle and ways of handling them. Some of the Fulani groups in the eastern states were sedentary, descendants of sedentary Fulani of the ruling group in northern Nigeria. Many speak Sudanese Arabic; some also speak Hausa and Songai as second languages.

Mahdist group is bilingual in Fulfulde and Sudanese Spoken Arabic. Few monolinguals; most are children. Previous migrations from Sokoto, Nigeria; Maasina, Mali; Liptaako and Jelgooji, Burkina Faso; Adamawa and Gombe, Nigeria; and the Wodaabe lineage have settled in Sudan. Some also from Cameroon. Predominant Fulfulde in Sudan is Adamawa. Influenced by Arabic. Muwalid group is monolingual in Sudanese Spoken Arabic.

The Sudan diaspora of the Hausa-Fulani

The Sudan diaspora of the Hausa-Fulani people was formed, definitively, around the first decade of this century. The first settlement, Mai Wurno on the right bank of the Blue Nile, soon became prosperous enough for a few daughter communities to be established in the Gezira area, the land between the two Niles. Presently, almost all the population centers in Gezira and along the Blue Nile have a foreign quarter mainly inhabited by people of West African origin, the majority of these being Hausa-Fulanis. They are mostly sedentary.

Besides, along the pilgrimage route between West Africa and Jidda-Makka, the so-called Alhaji Highway, every town has a sizeable West African quarter, from Geneina and Nyala on the Chad border to Suakin and Bor Sudan on the Red Sea. There, some percentages of the inhabitants are constantly on the move, on the way to or back from Makka.

People in the Sudan Hausa-Fulani community call themselves tàkaarii . Singular forms are either tàkaarà or tàkùruurù , obviously derived from an Arabic denomination (sg. takruur, pl. takaarii) of the well-known Senegalese ethnic group, Tukulors. The hosts, Arab people, generally call these diaspora settlements Fellata quarters. The dominant language in the diaspora is takaaranci , /-anci/ being a Hausa suffix denoting language.

From Mai Wurno town down south to the Ethiopian border, there are quite a few populous Hausa-Fulani settlements scattered along both banks of the Blue Nile. Here in this riverine strip, the lingua franca of the diaspora is Filatanci, the Fula language. Members of the diaspora are mostly trilingual: Fula, Hausa/Takaaranci and Arabic. On the other hand, along the Alhaji Highway, the diaspora language is Hausa/Takaaranci. Transient members are usually monolingual Hausa speakers with various degrees of fluency in Arabic.

The Revival of the Fula Language along the Blue Nile

At the time of Jihad in Hausaland around the beginning of the 19th century, Fulani Jihadists had been thoroughly Hausanized already and their mother tongue was Hausa, though Usman dan Hodiyo and his children could express their thoughts in Fula. But the Fula language soon became obsolete in the Sokkoto Empire, and by the time of the last independent Sardauna, Sultan Muhammadu Attahiru II, the Fulani ruling class completely abandoned the Fula language.

Therefore, when Bello Mai Wurno, a son of Sultan Attahiru, and his followers founded the Mai Wurno town and started the Sudan diaspora, the language of the diaspora must have been Hausa. But in the present, the dominant language in the Hausa-Fulani diaspora on the Blue Nile upstream from Mai Wurno town is Fula, along with Hausa/Takaaranci.

The revival of the Fula language is very enigmatic, because the diaspora people obviously did not need to introduce a new language other than Arabic, the language of their host people. Also, there existed no Fula group in the Sudan to influence the newly established Hausa-Fulani community and to act as a model. This question was partly answered by Ibrahim Mukoshi, a grandson of Bello Mai Wurno. On the way to Gezira, the survivors spent some time in Adamawa, where the Hausanization of the Fulani rulers was not complete yet. There in Adamawa, Bello and his party were given wives and female slaves as sadaka. They continued the hijra together with these newly acquired womenfolk. These women were mostly monolingual, and spoke only in Fula. Therefore, when the second generation grew up in the Sudan diaspora, they received both their mother's language, Fula, and their father's language, Hausa. That was the way in which Fula revived in the community.

In the genre of popular history, many legends of communal foundation contain accounts of male members and female members who hail from two different ethnic groups but come to live together, due to war, slavery or natural disaster. Certainly, if the Adamawa women had not brought the language into the community, it would have been impossible to find source material for the revival of the Fula language. ..