Oromo ( / ˈ ɒr ə m oʊ / OR -əm-ow or / ɔː ˈ r oʊ m oʊ / aw- ROW -mow ; Oromo: Afaan Oromoo ), historically also called Galla , which is regarded by the Oromo as pejorative, is an Afroasiatic language that belongs to the Cushitic branch. It is native to the Ethiopian state of Oromia and northern Kenya and is spoken predominantly by the Oromo people and neighboring ethnic groups in the Horn of Africa . It is used as a lingua franca particularly in the Oromia Region and northeastern Kenya.
76-623: Goba ( Oromo : Gobbaa , Amharic : ጎባ) is a town and separate woreda located in the Bale Zone of the Oromia Region , Ethiopia approximately 446 km southeast of Addis Ababa , this city has a latitude and longitude of 7°0′N 39°59′E / 7.000°N 39.983°E / 7.000; 39.983 and an elevation of 2,743 meters above sea level. The town is known for its Wednesday market and for honey , basketry and cotton shawl making; Bale National Park
152-523: A holy language by the Rastafari religion and is widely used among its followers worldwide. Early Afro-Asiatic populations speaking proto- Semitic , proto- Cushitic and proto- Omotic languages would have diverged by the fourth or fifth millennium BC. Shortly afterwards, the proto-Cushitic and proto-Omotic groups would have settled in the Ethiopian highlands, with the proto-Semitic speakers crossing
228-524: A pidgin as early as the 4th century AD to enable communication between Aksumite soldiers speaking Semitic, Cushitic, and Omotic languages, but this hypothesis has not garnered widespread acceptance. The preservation in Old Amharic of VSO word order and gutturals typical of Semitic languages, Cushitic influences shared with other Ethio-Semitic languages (especially those of the Southern branch), and
304-499: A reciprocal pronoun wal (English 'each other') that is used like of/if . That is, it is inflected for case but not person, number, or gender: wal jaalatu 'they like each other' (base form of wal ), kennaa walii bitan 'they bought each other gifts' (dative of wal ). Like English, Oromo makes a two-way distinction between proximal ('this, these') and distal ('that, those') demonstrative pronouns and adjectives. Some dialects distinguish masculine and feminine for
380-420: A stem , representing the lexical meaning of the verb, and a suffix , representing tense or aspect and subject agreement. For example, in dhufne 'we came', dhuf- is the stem ('come') and -ne indicates that the tense is past and that the subject of the verb is first person plural. As in many other Afroasiatic languages , Oromo makes a basic two-way distinction in its verb system between
456-441: A first language by an additional half-million people in parts of northern and eastern Kenya . It is also spoken by smaller numbers of emigrants in other African countries such as South Africa , Libya , Egypt and Sudan . Oromo is the most widely spoken Cushitic language and among the five languages of Africa with the largest mother-tongue populations. Oromo serves as one of the official working languages of Ethiopia and
532-432: A lot in the details, but the following changes are common. Verbs whose stems end in two consonants and whose suffix begins with a consonant must insert a vowel to break up the consonants since the language does not permit sequences of three consonants. There are two ways this can happen: either the vowel i is inserted between the stem and the suffix, or the final stem consonants are switched (an example of metathesis ) and
608-584: A number of members of other ethnicities who are in contact with the Oromo speak it as a second language. See, for example, the Omotic -speaking Bambassi and the Nilo-Saharan -speaking Kwama in northwestern Oromia. The Oromo people use a highly developed oral tradition. In the 19th century, scholars began writing in the Oromo language using Latin script . In 1842, Johann Ludwig Krapf began translations of
684-447: A scheduled service four time per week to Robe Airport connecting Goba to Addis Ababa and Arba Minch. The 2007 national census reported a total population for Goba of 32,025, of whom 15,182 were men and 16,843 were women; 4,797 or 6.13% of its population were urban dwellers. The majority of the inhabitants said they practiced Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity , with 69.84% of the population reporting they observed this belief, while 23.12% of
760-485: A short dry season with chillier mornings from November to January. Oromo language With more than 41.7 million speakers making up 33.8% of the total Ethiopian population , Oromo has the largest number of native speakers in Ethiopia, and ranks as the second most widely spoken language in Ethiopia by total number of speakers (including second-language speakers) following Amharic . Forms of Oromo are spoken as
836-438: A vowel (e.g. in word-final environments or as part of consonant clusters). The Arabic script has also been used intermittently in areas with Muslim populations. Like most other Ethiopian languages, whether Semitic, Cushitic, or Omotic, Oromo has a set of ejective consonants , that is, voiceless stops or affricates that are accompanied by glottalization and an explosive burst of air. Oromo has another glottalized phone that
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#1732772294248912-476: A word. This article uses ⟨c⟩ consistently for / tʃʼ / and ⟨ch⟩ for / tʃ / . Only the penultimate or final syllable of a root can have a high tone, and if the penultimate is high, the final must also be high; this implies that Oromo has a pitch-accent system (in which the tone need be specified only on one syllable, the others being predictable) rather than a tone system (in which each syllable must have its tone specified), although
988-403: Is 10 km to the southwest. A few kilometers outside of Goba are the remains of an old rock church. Goba shares Robe Airport ( ICAO code HAGB, IATA GOB) with neighbouring Robe . Ethiopian Airlines has a scheduled flight four times a week connecting Goba to the capital Addis Ababa and to the southern city Arba Minch . Ras Darge Sahle Selassie advance into southern Arsi and Bale led to
1064-868: Is Milk) became a hit in Ethiopia. To combat Somali wide-reaching influence, the Ethiopian Government initiated an Oromo language program radio of their own. Within Kenya there has been radio broadcasting in Oromo (in the Borana dialect) on the Voice of Kenya since at least the 1980s. The Borana Bible in Kenya was printed in 1995 using the Latin alphabet, but not using the same spelling rules as in Ethiopian Qubee. The first comprehensive online Oromo dictionary
1140-751: Is a South Ethio-Semitic language, along with Gurage , Argobba , Harari , and others. Due to the social stratification of the time, the Cushitic Agaw adopted the South Ethio-Semitic language and eventually absorbed the Semitic population. Amharic thus developed with a Cushitic substratum and a Semitic superstratum . The northernmost South Ethio-Semitic speakers, or the proto-Amhara, remained in constant contact with their North Ethio-Semitic neighbors, evidenced by linguistic analysis and oral traditions. A 7th century southward shift of
1216-559: Is a subject pro-drop language . That is, neutral sentences in which the subject is not emphasized do not require independent subject pronouns: kaleessa dhufne 'we came yesterday'. The Oromo word that translates 'we' does not appear in this sentence, though the person and number are marked on the verb dhufne ('we came') by the suffix -ne . When the subject in such sentences needs to be given prominence for some reason, an independent pronoun can be used: ' nuti kaleessa dhufne ' ' we came yesterday'. The table below gives forms of
1292-404: Is a two-way distinction between singular ('I', 'you sg.') and plural ('we', 'you pl.'), whereas for third person, there is a two-way distinction in the singular ('he', 'she') and a single form for the plural ('they'). Because Oromo has only two genders, there is no pronoun corresponding to English it ; the masculine or feminine pronoun is used according to the gender of the noun referred to. Oromo
1368-654: Is also the working language of several of the states within the Ethiopian federal system including Oromia , Harari and Dire Dawa regional states and of the Oromia Zone in the Amhara Region . It is a language of primary education in Oromia , Harari , Dire Dawa , Benishangul-Gumuz and Addis Ababa and of the Oromia Zone in the Amhara Region . It is used as an internet language for federal websites along with Tigrinya . Under Haile Selassie 's regime, Oromo
1444-817: Is an Ethiopian Semitic language , which is a subgrouping within the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic languages . It is spoken as a first language by the Amharas , and also serves as a lingua franca for all other populations residing in major cities and towns in Ethiopia . The language serves as the official working language of the Ethiopian federal government, and is also the official or working language of several of Ethiopia's federal regions . As of 2020, it has over 33,700,000 mother-tongue speakers and more than 25,100,000 second language speakers in 2019, making
1520-579: Is an abugida , and the graphemes of the Amharic writing system are called fidäl . It is derived from a modification of the Ge'ez script . Each character represents a consonant+vowel sequence, but the basic shape of each character is determined by the consonant, which is modified for the vowel. Some consonant phonemes are written by more than one series of characters: / ʔ / , / s / , / tsʼ / , and / h / (the last one has four distinct letter forms). This
1596-663: Is because these fidäl originally represented distinct sounds, but phonological changes merged them. The citation form for each series is the consonant+ ä form, i.e. the first column of the fidäl . The Amharic script is included in Unicode , and glyphs are included in fonts available with major operating systems. As in most other Ethiopian Semitic languages , gemination is contrastive in Amharic. That is, consonant length can distinguish words from one another; for example, alä 'he said', allä 'there is'; yǝmätall 'he hits', yǝmmättall 'he will be hit'. Gemination
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#17327722942481672-501: Is called an abugida ( አቡጊዳ ). The graphemes are called fidäl ( ፊደል ), which means "script", "alphabet", "letter", or "character". There is no universally agreed-upon Romanization of Amharic into Latin script . The Amharic examples in the sections below use one system that is common among linguists specializing in Ethiopian Semitic languages. Amharic has been the official working language of Ethiopia, language of
1748-419: Is more unusual, an implosive retroflex stop , "dh" in Oromo orthography, a sound that is like an English "d" produced with the tongue curled back slightly and with the air drawn in so that a glottal stop is heard before the following vowel begins. It is retroflex in most dialects, though it is not strongly implosive and may reduce to a flap between vowels. One source describes it as voiceless [ᶑ̥] . Oromo has
1824-469: Is mostly heard as the affricate sound [ t͡sʼ ]. The rhotic consonant is realized as a trill when geminated and a tap otherwise. The closed central unrounded vowel ⟨ə⟩ /ɨ/ and mid-central vowel ⟨ä⟩ /ə/ are generally fronted to [ ɪ ] and [ ɛ ], respectively, following palatal consonants , and generally retracted and rounded to [ ʊ ] and [ ɔ ], respectively, following labialized velar consonants . The Amharic script
1900-416: Is not indicated in Amharic orthography, but Amharic readers typically do not find this to be a problem. This property of the writing system is analogous to the vowels of Arabic and Hebrew or the tones of many Bantu languages , which are not normally indicated in writing. Ethiopian novelist Haddis Alemayehu , who was an advocate of Amharic orthography reform , indicated gemination in his novel Love to
1976-566: Is to treat the "singular" form as unspecified for number. When it is important to make the plurality of a referent clear, the plural form of a noun is used. Noun plurals are formed through the addition of suffixes . The most common plural suffix is -oota ; a final vowel is dropped before the suffix, and in the western dialects, the suffix becomes -ota following a syllable with a long vowel: mana 'house', manoota 'houses', hiriyaa 'friend', hiriyoota 'friends', barsiisaa 'teacher', barsiiso(o)ta 'teachers'. Among
2052-484: Is to use the noun meaning 'self': of(i) or if(i) . This noun is inflected for case but, unless it is being emphasized, not for person, number, or gender: isheen of laalti 'she looks at herself' (base form of of ), isheen ofiif makiinaa bitte 'she bought herself a car' (dative of of ). The other possibility is to use the noun meaning 'head', mataa , with possessive suffixes: mataa koo 'myself', mataa kee 'yourself (s.)', etc. Oromo has
2128-478: The Sinai Peninsula into Asia . A later return movement of peoples from South Arabia would have introduced the Semitic languages to Ethiopia. Based on archaeological evidence, the presence of Semitic speakers in the territory date to some time before 500 BC. Linguistic analysis suggests the presence of Semitic languages in Ethiopia as early as 2000 BC. Levine indicates that by the end of that millennium,
2204-715: The medium of instruction in elementary schools throughout the region, including areas where other ethnic groups live speaking their languages, and as a language of administration within the region. Since the OLF left the transitional Ethiopian government in the early 1990s, the Oromo Peoples' Democratic Organization (OPDO) continued developing Oromo in Ethiopia. Radio broadcasts began in the Oromo language in Somalia in 1960 by Radio Mogadishu . The programme featured music and propaganda. A song Bilisummaan Aannaani (Liberation
2280-504: The total number of speakers over 58,800,000. Amharic is the largest, most widely spoken language in Ethiopia, and the second most spoken mother-tongue in Ethiopia (after Oromo ). Amharic is also the second most widely spoken Semitic language in the world (after Arabic ). Amharic is written left-to-right using a system that grew out of the Geʽez script . The segmental writing system in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as units
2356-433: The ) with suffixes on the noun: -(t)icha for masculine nouns (the ch is geminated though this is not normally indicated in writing) and -(t)ittii for feminine nouns. Vowel endings of nouns are dropped before these suffixes: karaa 'road', karicha 'the road', nama 'man', namicha / namticha 'the man', haroo 'lake', harittii 'the lake'. For animate nouns that can take either gender,
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2432-469: The Ethiopianist tradition they are often transcribed with a dot below the letter. The notation of central vowels in the Ethiopianist tradition is shown in angled brackets. The voiced bilabial plosive /b/ is phonetically realized as a voiced labial approximant [β̞] medially between sonorants in non- geminated form. The fricative ejective / sʼ / is heard as a fricative ejective [ sʼ ], but
2508-591: The Ethnologue also lists 722,000 speakers of Borana and Orma , two languages closely related to Ethiopian Oromo. Within Ethiopia, Oromo is the language with the largest number of native speakers. Within Africa, Oromo is the language with the fourth most speakers, after Arabic (if one counts the mutually unintelligible spoken forms of Arabic as a single language and assumes the same for the varieties of Oromo), Swahili , and Hausa . Besides first language speakers,
2584-536: The Gospels of John and Matthew into Oromo, as well as a first grammar and vocabulary. The first Oromo dictionary and grammar was produced by German scholar Karl Tutschek in 1844. The first printing of a transliteration of Oromo language was in 1846 in a German newspaper in an article on the Oromo in Germany. After Abyssinia annexed Oromo's territory, the language's development into a full-fledged writing instrument
2660-523: The Grave by placing a dot above the characters whose consonants were geminated, but this practice is rare. Punctuation includes the following: One may construct simple Amharic sentences by using a subject and a predicate . Here are a few simple sentences: ኢትዮጵያ ʾItyop̣p̣ya Ethiopia አፍሪካ ʾAfrika Africa ውስጥ wǝsṭ in ናት nat is ኢትዮጵያ አፍሪካ ውስጥ ናት ʾItyop̣p̣ya ʾAfrika wǝsṭ nat {Ethiopia} {Africa} {in} {is} 'Ethiopia
2736-449: The alphabet used for writing the Geʽez language. There are 34 basic characters, each of which has seven forms depending on which vowel is to be pronounced in the syllable. There are also 49 "wa" letters, which form compound sounds involving "w." All together, the alphabet has some 280 letters. Until 2020 Amharic was the sole official language of Ethiopia. The 2007 census reported that Amharic
2812-421: The autobenefactive; in this case the s of the causative is replaced by f : deebi '- 'return (intransitive)', deebis- 'return (transitive), answer', deebifam- 'be returned, be answered', deebifadh- 'get back for oneself'. Another derived verbal aspect is the frequentative or "intensive," formed by copying the first consonant and vowel of the verb root and geminating the second occurrence of
2888-403: The basis for three derived voices, passive, causative, and autobenefactive, each formed with addition of a suffix to the root, yielding the stem that the inflectional suffixes are added to. The voice suffixes can be combined in various ways. Two causative suffixes are possible: ka '- 'go up', kaas- 'pick up', kaasis- 'cause to pick up'. The causative may be followed by the passive or
2964-520: The cases, there is a range of forms possible, some covering more than one case, and the differences in meaning among these alternatives may be quite subtle. In most languages, there is a small number of basic distinctions of person , number , and often gender that play a role within the grammar of the language. Oromo and English are such languages. We see these distinctions within the basic set of independent personal pronouns, for example, English I , Oromo ani ; English they , Oromo ' isaani ' and
3040-537: The center of gravity of the Kingdom of Aksum and the ensuing integration and Christianization of the proto-Amhara also resulted in a high prevalence of Geʽez sourced lexicon in Amharic. Some time after the 9th century AD, Amharic diverged from its closest relative, Argobba , probably due to religious differences as the Argobba adopted Islam. In 1983, Lionel Bender proposed that Amharic may have been constructed as
3116-434: The class is not predictable from the verb stem. It is the forms that precede suffixes beginning with consonants ( t and n ) that differ from the usual pattern. The third person masculine singular, second person singular, and first person plural present forms are shown for an example verb in each class. The common verbs fedh- 'want' and godh- 'do' deviate from the basic conjugation pattern in that long vowels replace
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3192-498: The core inhabitants of Greater Ethiopia would have consisted of dark-skinned agropastoralists speaking Afro-Asiatic languages of the Semitic, Cushitic and Omotic branches. Other scholars such as Messay Kebede and Daniel E. Alemu argue that migration across the Red Sea was defined by reciprocal exchange, if it even occurred at all, and that Ethio-Semitic-speaking ethnic groups should not be characterized as foreign invaders. Amharic
3268-574: The courts, the language of trade and everyday communications and of the military since the late 12th century. The Amhara nobles supported the Zagwe prince Lalibela in his power struggle against his brothers which led him to make Amharic Lessana Negus as well as fill the Amhara nobles in the top positions of his Kingdom. The appellation of "language of the king" ( Ge'ez : ልሳነ ነጋሢ ; "Lǝssanä nägaśi," Amharic : የነጋሢ ቋንቋ "Yä-nägaśi qʷanqʷa") and its use in
3344-472: The definite suffix may indicate the intended gender: qaalluu 'priest', qaallicha 'the priest (m.)', qallittii 'the priest (f.)'. The definite suffixes appear to be used less often than the in English, and they seem not to co-occur with the plural suffixes. Oromo nouns appear in seven grammatical cases , each indicated by a suffix, the lengthening of the noun's final vowel, or both. For some of
3420-537: The development of a camp at Goba in 1900, which was the site of a medieval Christian rock church or monastery. In 1907 Goba became the main center of administration in Bale under the governorship of Leul Sagad . Arnold Weinholt Hodson visited Goba while he was the British resident in southern Ethiopia (1914–1923), briefly describing it as a "large garrison town." Goba was the capital of the former Bale Province , until
3496-541: The digraphs ch, dh, ny, ph, sh. Gemination is not obligatorily marked for digraphs, though some writers indicate it by doubling the first element: qopphaa'uu 'be prepared'. In the charts below, the International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for a phoneme is shown in brackets where it differs from the Oromo letter. The phonemes /p v z/ appear in parentheses because they are only found in recently adopted words. There have been minor changes in
3572-462: The geminated consonants that would result when suffixes beginning with t or n are added: fedha 'he wants', feeta 'you (sg.) want', feena 'we want', feetu 'you (pl.) want', hin feene 'didn't want', etc. The verb dhuf- 'come' has the irregular imperatives koottu , koottaa . The verb deem- 'go' has, alongside regular imperative forms, the irregular imperatives deemi , deemaa . An Oromo verb root can be
3648-444: The gender of the modified noun). However, in the western dialects, the masculine forms (those beginning with k- ) are used in all cases. Possessive adjectives may take the case endings for the nouns they modify: ganda kootti 'to my village' ( -tti : locative case). As in languages such as French , Russian , and Turkish , the Oromo second person plural is also used as a polite singular form, for reference to people that
3724-509: The initial consonant. The resulting stem indicates the repetition or intensive performance of the action of the verb. Examples: bul- 'spend the night', bubbul- 'spend several nights', cab- 'break', caccab- 'break to pieces, break completely'; dhiib- 'push, apply pressure', dhiddhiib- 'massage'. The infinitive is formed from a verb stem with the addition of the suffix -uu . Verbs whose stems end in -dh (in particular all autobenefactive verbs) change this to ch before
3800-559: The newspaper Bariisaa , Urjii and many others, were written in the traditional Ethiopic script. Plans to introduce Oromo language instruction in schools, however, were not realized until the government of Mengistu Haile Mariam was overthrown in 1991, except in regions controlled by the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF). With the creation of the regional state of Oromia under the new system of ethnic federalism in Ethiopia, it has been possible to introduce Oromo as
3876-482: The number of geographically distinct Cushitic languages that have influenced Amharic at different points in time (e.g. Oromo influence beginning in the 16th century) support a natural evolution of Amharic from a Proto-Ethio-Semitic language with considerable Cushitic influences (similar to Gurage, Tigrinya, etc.). The Amharic ejective consonants correspond to the Proto-Semitic " emphatic consonants ." In
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#17327722942483952-473: The orthography since it was first adopted: ⟨x⟩ ( [ tʼ ] ) was originally rendered ⟨th⟩ , and there has been some confusion among authors in the use of ⟨c⟩ and ⟨ch⟩ in representing the phonemes / tʃʼ / and / tʃ / , with some early works using ⟨c⟩ for / tʃ / and ⟨ch⟩ for / tʃʼ / and even ⟨c⟩ for different phonemes depending on where it appears in
4028-422: The other common plural suffixes are -(w)wan , -een , and -(a)an ; the latter two may cause a preceding consonant to be doubled: waggaa 'year', waggaawwan 'years', laga 'river', laggeen 'rivers', ilma 'son', ilmaan 'sons'. Oromo has no indefinite articles (corresponding to English a , some ), but (except in the southern dialects) it indicates definiteness (English
4104-1190: The other. Grammatical gender in Oromo enters into the grammar in the following ways: Except in some southern dialects, there is nothing in the form of most nouns that indicates their gender. A small number of nouns pairs for people, however, end in -eessa (m.) and -eettii (f.), as do adjectives when they are used as nouns: obboleessa 'brother', obboleettii 'sister', dureessa 'the rich one (m.)', hiyyeettii 'the poor one (f.)'. Grammatical gender normally agrees with natural gender for people and animals; thus nouns such as Abbaa 'father', Ilma 'son', and sangaa 'ox' are masculine, while nouns such as haadha 'mother' and intala 'girl, daughter' are feminine. However, most names for animals do not specify biological gender. Names of astronomical bodies are feminine: aduu 'sun', urjii 'star'. The gender of other inanimate nouns varies somewhat among dialects. Oromo displays singular and plural number , but nouns that refer to multiple entities are not obligatorily plural: nama 'man' namoota 'people', nama shan 'five men' namoota shan 'five people'. Another way of looking at this
4180-412: The particle hin ). For example, deemne 'we went', deemna 'we go', akka deemnu 'that we go', haa deemnu 'let's go', hin deemnu 'we don't go'. There is also a separate imperative form: deemi 'go (sg.)!'. The table below shows the conjugation in the affirmative and negative of the verb beek- 'know'. The first person singular present and past affirmative forms require
4256-400: The particular verb tense / aspect / mood , they are normally not considered to be pronouns and are discussed elsewhere in this article under verb conjugation . In all of these areas of the grammar—independent pronouns, possessive adjectives, possessive pronouns, and subject–verb agreement—Oromo distinguishes seven combinations of person, number, and gender. For first and second persons, there
4332-495: The personal pronouns in the different cases, as well as the possessive adjectives. For the first person plural and third person singular feminine categories, there is considerable variation across dialects; only some of the possibilities are shown. The possessive adjectives, treated as separate words here, are sometimes written as noun suffixes. In most dialects there is a distinction between masculine and feminine possessive adjectives for first and second person (the form agreeing with
4408-414: The population were Muslim and 5.84% were Protestant . The 1994 national census reported this town had a total population of 28,358 of whom 13,155 were men and 15,203 were women. Owing to its very high altitude, Goba has a subtropical highland climate ( Köppen Cwb ) with cool to cold mornings and mild to warm afternoons year-round. There is a lengthy rainy season from February/March to October, and
4484-520: The population. As Gebru Tareke grimly concludes, "Between February 1970, when the revolt ended, and February 1974, when the imperial regime collapsed, precious little had changed in Bale, as indeed in the rest of Ethiopia." According to the third edition of the Lonely Planet guide to Ethiopia, "Goba is in a state of decline and Ethiopian Airlines has even cancelled its flights here." Starting from 1 September 2014, Ethiopian Airlines has announced
4560-545: The province was abolished with the adoption of the new constitution in 1995 . A telephone line connected Goba to Addis Ababa at least as early as 1936. During the Bale revolt , rebels attacked the capital twice between November 1965 and March 1966. In 1970 the town had the only high school in Bale Province; that year the school had 682 students, of whom 86 were Muslims in a province where Islam claimed over 90 per cent of
4636-499: The proximal pronouns; in the western dialects the masculine forms (beginning with k- ) are used for both genders. Unlike in English, singular and plural demonstratives are not distinguished, but, as for nouns and personal pronouns in the language, case is distinguished. Only the base and nominative forms are shown in the table below; the other cases are formed from the base form as for nouns, for example, sanatti 'at/on/in that' (locative case). An Oromo verb consists minimally of
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#17327722942484712-639: The royal court are otherwise traced to the Amhara Emperor Yekuno Amlak . It is one of the official languages of Ethiopia , together with other regions like Oromo , Somali , Afar , and Tigrinya . Amharic is an Afro-Asiatic language of the Southwest Semitic group and is related to Geʽez , or Ethiopic, the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox church; Amharic is written in a slightly modified form of
4788-475: The rules are complex (each morpheme can contribute its own tone pattern to the word), so that "one can call Oromo a pitch-accent system in terms of the basic lexical representation of pitch, and a tone system in terms of its surface realization." The stressed syllable is perceived as the first syllable of a word with high pitch. Like most other Afroasiatic languages , Oromo has two grammatical genders , masculine and feminine, and all nouns belong to either one or
4864-444: The set of possessive adjectives and pronouns , for example, English my , Oromo koo ; English mine , Oromo kan koo . In Oromo, the same distinctions are also reflected in subject–verb agreement: Oromo verbs (with a few exceptions) agree with their subjects ; that is, the person, number, and (singular third person) gender of the subject of the verb are marked by suffixes on the verb. Because these suffixes vary greatly with
4940-498: The speaker wishes to show respect towards. This usage is an example of the so-called T-V distinction that is made in many languages. In addition, the third person plural may be used for polite reference to a single third person (either 'he' or 'she'). For possessive pronouns ('mine', 'yours', etc.), Oromo adds the possessive adjectives to kan 'of': kan koo 'mine', kan kee 'yours', etc. Oromo has two ways of expressing reflexive pronouns ('myself', 'yourself', etc.). One
5016-431: The suffix -n to appear on the word preceding the verb or the word nan before the verb. The negative particle hin , shown as a separate word in the table, is sometimes written as a prefix on the verb. For verbs with stems ending in certain consonants and suffixes beginning with consonants (that is, t or n ), there are predictable changes to one or the other of the consonants. The dialects vary
5092-803: The suffix. Examples: dhug- 'drink', dhuguu 'to drink'; ga '- 'reach', ga ' uu 'to reach'; jedh- 'say', jechu 'to say'. The verb fedh- is exceptional; its infinitive is fedhuu rather than the expected fechuu . The infinitive behaves like a noun; that is, it can take any of the case suffixes. Examples: ga ' uu 'to reach', ga ' uuf 'in order to reach' (dative case); dhug- 'drink', dhugam- 'be drunk', dhugamuu to be drunk', dhugamuudhaan 'by being drunk' (instrumental case). Amharic Amharic ( / æ m ˈ h ær ɪ k / am- HARR -ik or / ɑː m ˈ h ɑːr ɪ k / ahm- HAR -ik ; native name : አማርኛ , romanized : Amarəñña , IPA: [amarɨɲːa] )
5168-417: The two tensed forms, past (or "perfect") and present (or "imperfect" or "non-past"). Each of these has its own set of tense/agreement suffixes. There is a third conjugation based on the present which has three functions: it is used in place of the present in subordinate clauses , for the jussive ('let me/us/him, etc. V', together with the particle haa ), and for the negative of the present (together with
5244-483: The typical Eastern Cushitic set of five short and five long vowels, indicated in the orthography by doubling the five vowel letters. The difference in length is contrastive, for example, hara 'lake', haaraa 'new'. Gemination is also significant in Oromo. That is, consonant length can distinguish words from one another, for example, badaa 'bad', baddaa 'highland'. In the Qubee alphabet, letters include
5320-411: The vowel a is inserted between them. For example, arg- 'see', arga 'he sees', argina or agarra (from agar-na ) 'we see'; kolf- 'laugh', kolfe 'he laughed', kolfite or kofalte 'you (sg.) laughed'. Verbs whose stems end in the consonant ' (which may appear as h , w , or y in some words, depending on the dialect) belong to three different conjugation classes;
5396-717: Was an indigenous Oromo script invented by Sheikh Bakri Sapalo (1895–1980; also known by his birth name, Abubaker Usman Odaa) in the late 1950s, and used underground afterwards. Despite structural and organizational influences from Ge'ez and the Arabic script , it is a graphically independent creation designed specifically for Oromo phonology. It is largely an Abugida in nature, but lacks the inherent vowel present in many such systems; in actual use, all consonant characters are obligatorily marked either with vowel signs (producing CV syllables) or with separate marks used to denote geminated consonants or pure/standalone consonants not followed by
5472-478: Was banned in education, in conversation, and in administrative matters. Ethnologue (2015) assigns five ISO codes to Oromo: Blench (2006) divides Oromo into four languages: Some of the varieties of Oromo have been examined and classified. About 85 percent of Oromo speakers live in Ethiopia , mainly in the Oromia Region . In addition, in Somalia there are also some speakers of the language. In Kenya ,
5548-518: Was developed by the Jimma Times Oromiffa Group (JTOG) in cooperation with SelamSoft. Voice of America also broadcasts in Oromo alongside its other horn of Africa programs. In May 2022, Google Translate added Afaan Oromo as translation. Oromo and Qubee are currently utilized by the Ethiopian government's state radios, TV stations and regional government newspaper. Oromo is written with a Latin alphabet called Qubee which
5624-550: Was formally adopted in 1991. Various versions of the Latin-based orthography had been used previously, mostly by Oromos outside of Ethiopia and by the OLF by the late 1970s (Heine 1986). With the adoption of Qubee, it is believed more texts were written in the Oromo language between 1991 and 1997 than in the previous 100 years. In Kenya, the Borana and Waata also use Roman letters but with different systems. The Sapalo script
5700-490: Was interrupted. The few works that had been published, most notably Onesimos Nesib 's and Aster Ganno 's translations of the Bible from the late 19th century, were written in the Ge'ez alphabet . Following the 1974 Revolution , the government undertook a literacy campaign in several languages, including Oromo, and publishing and radio broadcasts began in the language. All Oromo materials printed in Ethiopia at that time, such as
5776-475: Was spoken by 21.6 million native speakers in Ethiopia. More recent sources state the number of first-language speakers in 2018 as nearly 32 million, with another 25 million second-language speakers in Ethiopia. Additionally, 3 million emigrants outside of Ethiopia speak the language. Most of the Ethiopian Jewish communities in Ethiopia and Israel speak Amharic. Furthermore, Amharic is considered
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