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Afar (Qafár af) is a Lowland East Cushitic language spoken in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti. It is believed to have 1.5 million speakers, the Afar. The basic word order in Afar, like in other East Cushitic languages, is Subject Object Verb. Its speakers have a literacy rate of between one and three per cent. Its closest relative is the Saho language. Image File history File links This is a lossless scalable vector image. ... Current distribution of Human Language Families A language family is a group of related languages said to have descended from a common proto-language. ... The Afro-Asiatic languages constitute a language family (Languages of Africa) with about 375 languages (SIL estimate) and more than 300 million speakers spread throughout North Africa, East Africa, West Africa, Central Africa, and Southwest Asia (including some 200 million speakers of Arabic). ... The Cushitic languages are a subgroup of the Afro-Asiatic languages, named after the Biblical figure Cush by analogy with Semitic. ... The East Cushitic languages comprise more than thirty languages belonging to the Cushitic family within the Afro-Asiatic phylum. ... ISO 639-1 is the first part of the ISO 639 international-standard language-code family. ... ISO 639-2 is the second part of the ISO 639 standard, which lists codes for the representation of the names of languages. ... ISO 639-3 is an international standard for language codes. ... Articles with similar titles include the NATO phonetic alphabet, which has also informally been called the “International Phonetic Alphabet”. For information on how to read IPA transcriptions of English words, see IPA chart for English. ... Unicode is an industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in any of the worlds writing systems. ... The East Cushitic languages comprise more than thirty languages belonging to the Cushitic family within the Afro-Asiatic phylum. ... Afar (or Danakil) are a tribal people who reside principally in the Danakil Desert in the Afar Region of Ethiopia and in Eritrea and Djibouti. ... In linguistic typology, Subject Object Verb (SOV) is the type of languages in which the subject, object, and verb of a sentence appear (usually) in that order. ... The Saho language is an East Cushitic language of Eritrea, spoken in the middle of the country, as well as by a small group across the border in Ethiopia. ...

Phonology

Consonants

The consonants of the Afar language in the standard orthography are listed below (with IPA notation in brackets):

Consonants which close syllables are released, e.g., akʰˡme.

Vowels

• short
  • a [ʌ]
  • e [e]
  • i [i]
  • o [o]
  • u [u]
• long
  • aa [aː]
  • ee [eː]
  • ii [iː]
  • oo [oː]
  • uu [uː]

Sentence final vowels of affirmative verbs are aspirated (and stressed), e.g., abeh = aˡbeʰ 'He did.' Sentence final vowels of negative verbs are not aspirated (nor stressed), e.g.,maabinna = ˡmaabinna 'He did not do.' Sentence final vowels of interrogative verbs are lengthened (and stressed), e.g. abee? = aˡbe: 'Did he do?'

Stress

Stress is word-final. Syllables are of the form (C)V(V)(C). One exception is the three-consonant cluster -str-.

Writing system

Afar may be written either with the Latin alphabet or Ge'ez script. The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. ... Note: This article contains special characters. ...

Latin alphabet

For other uses of A, see A (disambiguation). ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Its name in English is tee . ... Look up S, s in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up E, e in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up C, c in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up K, k in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up X, x in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up I, i in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... For the emoticon :D, see Emoticon. ... Look up Q, q in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up R, r in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up F, f in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Look up O, o in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up L, l in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up M, m in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up N, n in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up U, u in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up W, w in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Look up H, h in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ...

See also

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• Afar people
• Afar Region

Afar (or Danakil) are a tribal people who reside principally in the Danakil Desert in the Afar Region of Ethiopia and in Eritrea and Djibouti. ... Map of Ethiopia highlighting the Afar region. ...

Bibliography

• Bliese, Loren F. (1976) Afar, in Bender, Lionel M. (ed.) The Non-Semitic Languages of Ethiopia. Michigan: African Studies Center, Michigan State University, 133–164.
• Bliese, Loren F. (1981) A generative grammar of Afar (Summer Institute of Linguistics publications in linguistics vol. 65). Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics / Arlington, Texas: University of Texas at Arlington.
• Colby, J.G. (1970) Notes on the northern dialect of the 'Afar language, Journal of Ethiopian Studies, 8, 1, 1–8.
• Hayward, R.J. and Parker, Enid M. (1985) Afar-English-French dictionary with Grammatical Notes in English, London, School of Oriental and African Studies.
• Morin, Didier (1997) Poésie traditionnelle des Afars (Langues et cultures africaines, 21 / SELAF vol. 363). Paris/Louvain: Peeters.
• Parker, Enid M. (2006), English-Afar Dictionary, Washington DC, Dunwoody Press
• Voigt, Rainer M. (1975) Bibliographie des Saho-Afar, Africana Marburgensia, vol. 8, 53–63.

External links

• Afar language at Ethnologue
• Afar Sample at Language Museum
• The beginning of Genesis 1 in Afar at The Rosetta Project.
• PanAfriL10n page on Afar

Afar language edition of Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia