The Saho and the Afar languages are its closest relatives. As of , Somalia houses about 8. There are three main dialect groups of the Somali language. Northern Somali is the closest to Standard Somali. The Maay dialect group of Somali is spoken by the Mirifle and Digil clans in parts of southern Somalia.
Arabic is also one of the official national languages spoken in Somalia. The language is spoken by many Somalis. The importance of the Arabic language in Somalia is due to the age-old cultural and ethnic connections between the Arab world and the Somalis. Somali is spoken by 6. It is also spoken in Ethiopia , Djibouti , and Kenya.
The total number of Somali speakers worldwide is estimated at close to 15 million Ethnologue. The figure actually may be somewhat higher. It is difficult to collect reliable dataabout the numerous expatriate Somali communities around the world. In Somalia, Somali is spoken by most of the people in the country. It is used in education, administration and the media. It is taught as a subject and used as a medium of instruction in the primary schools and as a subject in secondary schools. There are many radio and TV stations around the world that broadcast some of their programs in Somali.
Somali shares many features with other Cushitic languages. For instance, Somali syllables typically end in a vowel or a single consonant, consonant clusters do not occur in the beginning or at the end of words, and roots usually consist of one or two syllables.
Somali has five vowel phonemes, i. The number of vowel phonemes can differ somewhat from dialect to dialect. The vowels can be short or long. Vowel length makes a difference in word meaning.
In the table below, long vowels are marked by a macron over the vowel. In the orthography, long vowels are represented by a double vowel, e. In addition to short and long vowels, Somali has numerous diphthongs. Somali has 24 consonants. These sounds occur only in borrowed words. The language is rich in velar , uvular , pharyngeal , and glottal consonants, sounds that are produced at the back of the oral cavity. The tonal system of Somali is similar to that of Oromo.
There are three basic tones: high marked by an acute accent , low marked by a grave accent , and falling marked by a circumflex accent. Somali tone operates at the grammatical, rather than at the lexical level, as it does in languages such as Chinese. Stress typically falls on the final or on the penultimate vowel of a word.
Somali is an agglutinative language that uses suffixes attached to roots for representing grammatical information. Somali verbs consist of a stem to which suffixes are added. Verbs in indicative mood exist in four tenses, present, present continuous, past and past continuous, in addition to a subjunctive mood form for present and future tense.
Verbs in Somali conjugate mainly through the addition of suffixes, although a very small number of common verbs maintain an archaic conjugation using prefixes. Verbs are marked for the following categories:. Word order in Somali sentences is typically Subject-Object-Verb.
In general, Somali has a topic-focus grammatical category that marks the information structure of sentences, i. Somali vocabulary is Cushitic in origin. The most productive ways of word derivation are reduplication and compounding. Somali has been heavily influenced by Arabic mainly through the medium of Islam. It has also borrowed words from the languages of its former colonizers, such as Italian , English , and French. Somali was not written until the Osmanya alphabet was developed in Osmanya is written from left to right in horizontal rows.
The names of the letters were taken from Arabic. The Latin alphabet was adopted in Below is the current Somali Latin-based alphabet with the letters listed in the traditional Arabic order. There is no standardized orthography so variations occur. How difficult is it to learn Somali? The Somali language is spoken by approximately 16 million people in Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Yemen and Kenya, as well as by the Somali diaspora.
Many Somalis fled to countries in the Middle East, Europe and North America because of famine and decades of civil war at home. Now, over 1 million Somali refugees live abroad, and more than 1. The United States alone has accepted more than , Somali refugees since Currently the size of the Somali-American community is estimated to be more than , In the U.
The Somali language has traditionally been an oral one, with low literacy rates in the country. Somali people are often fluent in several spoken languages including Arabic, English and Italian, but only This low literacy rate is in part due to the different writing systems which have been used over the years to transcribe the Somali language.
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