Somali language

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Categories: East Cushitic languages | Languages of Somalia | Languages of Ethiopia

Somali af Soomaali
Spoken in:	Somaliland, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya significant communities in Europe, North America, and Yemen.
Total speakers:	10-16 million native and at least 500,000 second language speakers.
Language family:	Afro-Asiatic Cushitic East Somali
Official status
Official language in:	Somalia
Regulated by:	no official regulation
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	`so`
ISO 639-2:	`som`
ISO 639-3:	`som`
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Somalia
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Somali (Af Soomaali) is a member of the East Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family, spoken by ethnic Somalis in Somalia and adjacent parts of Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya, as well as by the Somali diaspora around the world, with an estimated total population of between 10 and 16 million speakers. Somali was declared the official language of Somalia in 1972 and is used in education, administration and the media.

1 Classification
2 Geographic Distribution
- 2.1 Official status
- 2.2 Dialects
3 Sounds/Phonology
4 Grammar
5 Vocabulary
6 Writing system
7 History
8 See Also
9 References
10 External links
11 Notes

Classification

Somali is an Afro-Asiatic language, of the East Cushitic branch. It is most closely related to Oromo and Afar. Compared with other Cushitic languages, Somali is relatively well-documented, with academic studies of the language dating from around 1900.

Geographic Distribution

Image:Ethiopia-Somali.png

Somali Region in Ethiopia

Image:Kenya Dialect map.jpg

Ethnicity and languages in Kenya

The exact number of speakers is unknown, but is estimated to be 10 million anywhere up to 16 million. One article from the Refugee Council puts the number at seven million Somalis, one million in Ethiopia's Ogaden region, and 300,000 in Kenya.^[1] Ethnologue estimates 7.78 million speakers in Somalia and 12.65 million speakers worldwide.^[2] However, the population of Somalia is estimated to be 8.8 million presently; one million more speakers more than Ethnologue estimates.^[3] Another population estimate made by the Dutch Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht puts the Somali population somewhere between 10 and 15 million.^[4] Combined with a large international expatriate community, it is difficult to get a specific number of Somali speakers, but somewhere between 10 and 16 million worldwide is a reasonable estimate.

Official status

Somali was the national language of Somalia from 1972, gaining official status after standardization and the adoption of the Latin alphabet, developed under orders of the then dictator Siad Barre. After the collapse of the central Somali government in the Somali civil war in the 1990s, Somali has remained an official language or de facto national language of the various regional governments such as Somaliland and Puntland.

Dialects

Somali dialects are divided into three main groups: Northern, Benaadir and Maay. Northern Somali (or Northern-Central Somali) forms the basis for Standard Somali. Benaadir (also known as Coastal Somali) is spoken on the Benadir Coast from Cadale to south of Marka, including Mogadishu, and in the immediate hinterland. The coastal dialects have additional phonemes which do not exist in Common Somali.

The Digil and Mirifle clans (sometimes called Rahanweyn) live in the southern areas of Somalia. Recent research (Diriye Abdullahi, 2000) has shown that, although previously classified with Somali, their languages and dialects are incomprehensible to some Somali speakers. The most important language of the Digil and Mirifle is Maay. Other languages in this category are Jiido, Dabare, Garre, and Central Tunni. Of all these, Jiido is the most incomprehensible to Somali speakers. One important aspect in which the languages of the Digil and Mirifle differ from Somali is the lack of pharyngeal sounds. The retroflex /ɖ/ is also replaced by /r/ in some positions.

Sounds/Phonology

Main article: Somali phonology

Somali has 22 consonant phonemes, with at least one in every place of articulation described on the IPA chart, except epiglottal. It has five basic vowel sounds, each having a front and back variation, as well as long or short versions, giving distinct 20 pure vowel sounds. It also exhibits three tones, high, low and falling.

Grammar

Main article: Somali grammar

Somali is an agglutinative language, using a number of markers for case, gender and number. Characteristic differences between Somali and most Indo-European languages include multiple forms of most personal pronouns, the use of particles to signify the focus of a sentence, extensive use of tone to denote differences in case and number and gender polarity, a phenomenon where the plural form of a word is the opposite gender of the singular.

Vocabulary

Somali contains a number of loan words from Arabic and Persian, as well as from the former colonial languages English and Italian. As the Somalis are almost exclusively Sunni muslims, Somali has borrowed much religious terminology from Arabic, although there are also Persian or Arabic loan words for everyday objects (e.g. Somali albab-ka (the door), from the Arabic الباب al baab).

A large number of neologisms were created after Somali was made the official language in 1972, to cope with concepts used in government and education.

Writing system

Main article: Somali alphabet

The Somali Latin alphabet used since 1972 was developed specifically for the Somali language using all letters of the English Latin alphabet except P, V and Z. There are no diacritics or other special characters, although it includes 3 consonant digraphs: DH, KH and SH. Tone is not marked and a word-initial glottal stop is also not shown. Capital letters are used for names and at the beginning of a sentence.

A number of other scripts have been used or proposed for writing Somali in the past, including the Arabic-based Abjad Wadaad's writing, the Osmanya script and the Borama script.

History

Before the colonial period, educated Somalis and religious fraternities either wrote in Arabic or used an ad hoc transliteration of Somali into Arabic script. Sayyid Mohammed Abdullah Hassan's letter to a scholar, betraying him to the colonial powers, was in Arabic. The Qur'an was taught throughout Somalia, so children were exposed to the Arabic alphabet from a young age. Material discovered in 1940, mainly ancient letters and tomb inscriptions, demonstrates that the Somali language was written with the Arabic alphabet, like the Urdu and Persian languages. But this was not certainly "codified", and questions remain about the extent of its use.

A number of attempts had been made from the 1920s onwards to standardize the language using a number of different alphabets. Pamphlets explaining the new standardization were released to the public in a soccer stadium in Mogadishu on October 10, 1972.

The first comprehensive dictionaries were produced in 1976, the Qaamuus kooban ee af Soomaali ah and Qaamuuska Af-Soomaaliga. Civil servants were required to pass language proficiency exams and in the rural literacy campaign students were sent to rural areas to teach others the new script. Reportedly, by 1978 the majority of Somalis were literate, the fastest development of literacy in the history of Africa, although in recent times the civil war and resulting breakup of central control of Somalia has seen a decline in literacy and a stagnation of cultural development in the language.

References

Diriye Abdullahi, Mohamed. 2000. Le Somali, dialectes et histoire. Ph.D. dissertation, Université de Montréal.
Saeed, John Ibrahim. 1993. Somali Reference Grammar. Springfield, VA: Dunwoody Press.
Saeed, John Ibrahim. 1999. Somali. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.