Kanuri

There, he mastered writing in Kanuri and then Arabic.

"We left because of the insecurity caused by Boko Haram," she tells me in Kanuri, via a translator.

There are versions in local pidgin English, Hausa, Kanuri and Fulani.

Shekau was fluent in his native Kanuri language, as well as Hausa and Arabic.

Unlike many of her fellow students, she wasn’t a member of the indigenous Kanuri people – she was Igbo, an ethnic group whose ancestral land lies in the south-east of Nigeria.