Bagirmi (language)
| Bagirmi ( ɓarma ) | ||
|---|---|---|
|
Spoken in |
Chad , Nigeria | |
| speaker | 44,761 | |
| Linguistic classification |
|
|
| Official status | ||
| Recognized minority / regional language in |
 Chad
|
|
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639 -2 |
ssa |
|
| ISO 639-3 |
bmi |
|
Bagirmi (also Baguirmi; own name: ɓarma) is the language of the Bagirmi people in Chad and belongs to the family of Nilo-Saharan languages . The language was spoken by 44,761 people in 1993, mainly in Chari-Baguirmi Prefecture . It was the main language of the Sultanate of Bagirmi .
Bagirmi were written down in the 1990s by the missionaries Don and Orpha Raun, with whose help the first simple texts on literacy were created. In 2003, Anthony Kimball developed a script to support the Bagirmi alphabet and a Keyman input method for Latin-based keyboards. The literature corpus in Bagirmi is increasing. Literature in this language is distributed in Chad for a small fee, mainly by David Raun as a service to the Bagirmi-speaking peoples of Chad.