It is spoken mainly in Cameroon but also by significant communities residing in Nigeria, Chad, and Sudan by Fulani pastoralists across the Sahel.
[2] Adamawa Fulfulde was originally brought to Cameroon in the early parts of the 19th century during a religious war (Jihad) that was launched by Usman dan Fodio from Northern Nigeria.
The language itself is divided into a number of sub-dialects: Maroua, Garoua, Ngaondéré, Kambariire, Mbororoore, and Bilkire.
In South Sudan, it is spoken in Western Bahr el Ghazal state by Ambororo cattle herders.
[6] Adamawa Fulfulde has the Morphological imperative in which words are divided into second singular and second plural,[7] and like many of the languages of the Fula dialect continuum and Niger–Congo language family, Adamawa Fulfulde has a system of noun classes and marks plurals by mutating the initial consonant of a word.
While traditionally, the Arabic alphabet was used in its unmodified original 28-character state, and thus no distinction was made between similar sounds, such as [b]/[mb]/[ɓ], [d]/[nd], or [p]/[f], today, despite a lack of governmental endorsement in many instances, these letters and writing conventions have been standardized and agreed upon.
In 1998, at the JCMWA/MICCAO conference in Ngaoundéré, Cameroon, over 100 representatives from 14 West African countries agreed that this orthography would be a good standard for writing the Fulfulde language with Arabic script.