Mohammad Idris S/Kudu, PhD
&
Isa Adamu Haliru, PhD
Abstract
The study investigates the main linguistic peculiarities of Kunini as a speech community. The
language is a member of the Niger – Kordofanian, Niger- Congo, Benue – Congo of the Jukunoid
phylum. The trust of the study is the identification and explication of grammatical elements found
in the language. The study employs interview, elicitation of Swedish wordlist by native speakers,
participant observation and intuitive knowledge of the native speakers were transcribed as primary
data. The study has been anchored on the theoretical underpinning of the Basic Linguistic Theory
(BLT) associated with Dixion, R.M.W. (1997). The research findings reveal some peculiarities in
the consonant sounds and vowel inventory of the language. Other findings reveal the sentence
structure of the language such as the declarative, imperative, question formations as well as
Negation Construction. Also, the research identify seven (7) vowel phonemes and consonant
modification as in the following: palatized, labiarized palatal – labialized, rhotocized, lateralized
and prenazalized. Morphologically, the following morphological processes such as reduplication,
compounding, clipping, inflectional and derivational affixes were discussed. Semantically, kinship
terms, homophones, polysemy, food terms, colour terms, taboo and pathetic terms were discussed.
Introduction
The Kunini people live in the region between Lau and Abbare of Lau Local Government Area of
Taraba State, North-Eastern Nigeria. Their population figures are hard to estimate but
conservatively now exceeds 7,000 native speakers. In the earlier literature, Kunini is referred to as
Nyeh (as an alternate). The Nyeh is not commonly used among the people.
Kunini stands for the people, land, and the language. They are described as tall and huge. According
to Kundi (2007:10), this description does not in any way suggests that there are no short people
among them…