Somali (Somali: Af Soomaali) is a member of the East Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family spoken by ethnic Somalis in Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Yemen and Kenya, as well as by the Somali diaspora around the world -- an estimated total population of between 10 and 16 million speakers.

In 1972, Somali was declared the official language of Somalia and is used in education, administration and the media.

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

Map of Somalia

Official status

Somali was the national language of Somalia from 1972, gaining official status with standardization (Standard Somali) and the adoption of the Latin alphabet, developed under orders of then president 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 Standard 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 many 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 is also replaced by in some positions.

Sounds/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

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 used for centries and even now, as well as some from european languages that are Italian and English. As the Somalis are almost exclusively, if not all (alhamdolillah) Muslims, Somali language has much religious terminology from the Qur'an which is in Arabic language, although there are also Persian or Arabic loan words for everyday objects (e.g. Somali albab-ka (the door), from the Arabic ????? al baab).

Writing system

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, front and back vowels are not distinguished, and a word-initial glottal stop is not shown. Capital letters are used at the beginning of a sentence and for proper names.

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.

See also

• Afro-Asiatic languages
• Osmanya script
• Borama script
• Wadaad's writing

References

• Diriye Abdullahi, Mohamed. 2000. Le Somali, dialectes et histoire. Ph.D. dissertation, Université de Montréal.
• Saeed, John Ibrahim. 1987. Somali Reference Grammar. Springfield, VA: Dunwoody Press.
• Saeed, John Ibrahim. 1999. Somali. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Further reading

• L.E. Armstrong. 1964. "The phonetic structure of Somali," Mitteilungen des Seminars für Orientalische Sprachen Berlin 37/3:116-161.
• C.R.V. Bell. 1953. The Somali Language. London: Longmans, Green & Co.
• Jörg Berchem. 1991. Referenzgrammatik des Somali. Köln: Omimee.
• G.R. Cardona. 1981. "Profilo fonologico del somalo," Fonologia e lessico. Ed. G.R. Cardona & F. Agostini. Rome: Dipartimento per la Cooperazione allo Sviluppo; Comitato Tecnico Linguistico per l'Universita Nazionale Somala, Ministero degli Affari Esteri. Volume 1, pages 3-26.
• Elena Z. Dobnova. 1990. Sovremennyj somalijskij jazyk. Moskva: Nauka.
• Annarita Puglielli. 1997. "Somali Phonology," Phonologies of Asia and Africa, Volume 1. Ed. Alan S. Kaye. Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns. Pages 521-535.

External links

• Ethnologue report on Somali
• Comprehensive Somali-English Dictionary
• Somali - English Dictionary
• Omniglot page on Osmanya and the Somali Latin alphabet
• Osmanya considered for the Universal Character Set
• PanAfrican L10n page on Somali
• The Somali Language Page: The resources, the links, the information on the Somali language.

Notes

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