Somali language
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Somali | ||
|---|---|---|
| af Soomaali الصومالية |
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| Spoken in | Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Yemen, Kenya and the Somali community in the Middle East, Europe and North America. | |
| Total speakers | 10-16 million native speakers and maybe 500,000 second language speakers. | |
| Language family | Afro-Asiatic | |
| Writing system | Latin, Arabic, Osmanya script, | |
| 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. | ||
The Somali language (Somali: Af Soomaali, Arabic: الصومالية) is a member of the East Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Its nearest relatives are Afar and Oromo. Somali is the best-documented of the Cushitic languages, with academic studies of it from before 1900.
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[edit] Number of speakers
Estimates of the number of native speakers are diverse. Absent homeland census statistics and the many expatriates make it impossible to say how many speak Somali, but a plausible estimate would be between 10 and 16 million worldwide of whom 500,000 are second language speakers.
One source estimates that there are 7.78 million speakers of Somali in Somalia and 12.65 million speakers globally.[1]. Such precision for a country with no effective central government since 1991 must be viewed sceptically.
The Dutch Universiteitsbibliotheek Utrecht put the Somali population as between 10 and 15 million.[2]
[edit] Geographic distribution
It is spoken by ethnic Somalis in Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Yemen and Kenya, and by the Somali diaspora.
[edit] Official status
| Somalia |
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In 1972 the then president, Siad Barre, decreed Somali to be the national and official language of Somalia, adopting a Standard Somali and the use of the Latin alphabet. The earlier rule of Somalia by European countries with different languages led in the transition to independence to the use of those languages in government, especially since much professional education took place in those countries or in the English speaking USA. Until Siad's ukase the writing of Somali was a vexed question, the only time the Mogadishu newspaper "Corriere della Somalia", which normally had three pages in Italian and one in Arabic, printed a Somali page in European letters provoked a noisy demonstration against the use the infidels' alphabet. Since 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 all regional governments such as Somaliland and Puntland.
[edit] 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 /ɖ/ is also replaced by /r/ in some positions.
[edit] Sounds and 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.
[edit] 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 (the gender of a word changes between its singular and its plural).
[edit] Vocabulary
Somali contains a number of loan words from Arabic, Persian, and the former colonial languages English and Italian. Somalis are almost exclusively Sunni Muslims and the language has taken much religious terminology from Arabic. From the pastoral epoch there are Arabic loan words for objects of settled living such as the Somali albaabka (the door), from the Arabic الباب al baab, which displays the same inclusion of the definite article as do many European words derived from Arabic.
A large number of neologisms were created after Somali became the official language to express concepts used in government and education.
[edit] Writing system
The Somali Latin alphabet used since 1972 was developed specifically for the Somali language, and uses all letters of the English Latin alphabet except P, V and Z. Shire Jama Ahmed is the linguist who invented the current Somali Script. The Somali Alphabet has 21 consonants and 5 vowels. There are no diacritics or other special characters except the use of the apostrophe for the glottal stop, which is not word-initial. There are three consonant digraphs: DH, KH and SH. Tone is not marked, front and back vowels are not distinguished. Capital letters are used at the beginning of a sentence and for proper names.
A number of other scripts have been used for writing Somali in the past, most notable of which is Osmanya, which was the official writing script in Somalia for a few years. The Borama script and Wadaad's writing were also used.
Debate about which script to use for Af Soomaalia dragged on for 9 years starting from 1960. No fewer than a dozen linguists were on the task to come up with a workable script. Eventually, Shire Jama Ahmed's script was adopted. He used his version of Somali Latin Script to publish pamphlets and small Af Soomaali drillbooks. He argued that even though most people were in favor of using Arabic script, reality dictated otherwise. Printing machines, typewriters and all the other equipment available in the country were designed to print latin letters. Additionally, most of the educated Somalis at the time were educated by the colonial countries, Italy and England. In other words, both sources, man and machine, use latin script.
[edit] 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.
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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'Università 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.
[edit] 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.
- List of Somali language learning material
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