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| Somali | Resources |
Somali is an East Cushitic language spoken by over 5 million people in Somalia, northeast Kenya, the Ogaden region of
Ethiopia and Djibouti. It is most closely related to Rendille and Boni both spoken in Kenya. There are three main
dialects--common Somali, central Somali (Rahaween) and coastal Somali (Benaadir).and each has significant
sub-dialects. Standard written Somali (the official language of Somalia) is based on common Somali although there are
many variations (e.g., alternative spellings) based on differing dialectal usages.
The written language uses the Roman alphabet. It has a tonal-accent system with each word having at most one high tone. It also manifests vowel harmony in that all vowels within a given word conform to the same harmonic category. While it has been described as a Subject-Object-Verb language, constituent order is rather free and more likely to reflect topic-focus considerations. Within NPs, word order is fixed. The verbal morphology is agglutinative, showing tense, aspect and subject agreement. There are pre-verbal case particles for oblique objects and pre-verbal object clitics. Noun morphology is regular. Noun affixes mark two genders (masculine and feminine) and three determiners (the equivalents of .the., .this. and .that.). Curiously, many nouns reverse gender when they are plural. Case is indicated by way of accent shifts or certain suffixes (for definite subjects). The language also has a rich derivational morphology for both nouns and verb. Sample Somali text To learn more about Somali, visit the Ethnologue. |
Somali-English dictionary Somali-English dictionary contains 7036 entries including proper names.
Somali Resource Package 
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