The Daasanach are an ethnic group of Ethiopia, Kenya and Sudan. Their main homeland is in the Debub Omo Zone of the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People's Region of Ethiopia, around the North end of Lake Turkana. The number of persons in this ethnic group exceeds 30,000. Flag of the SNNPR. Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples Region (often abbreviated as SNNPR) is one of the nine ethnic divisions (kililoch) of Ethiopia. ... View over Lake Turkana Lake Turkana, formerly known as Lake Rudolf, is a lake in the Great Rift Valley in Kenya (although the far northern end of the lake crosses into Ethiopia), which covers a surface area of 6405 km² (2473 mi²), making it the worlds largest permanent desert...

There are a number of variant spellings of Daasanach, including Dasenach and Dassanech (the latter used in an episode about them in the TV series Going Tribal). Daasanach is the primary name given in the Ethnologue language entry[1].

The Daasanach language is a Cushitic language, notable for its large number of noun classes, irregular verb system, and implosive consonants (for instance, the initial D in Daasanach is implosive, sometimes written as 'D). The Cushitic languages are a subgroup of the Afro-Asiatic languages, named after the Biblical figure Cush by analogy with Semitic. ...

Further reading

• Uri Almagor, "Institutionalizing a fringe periphery: Sassanetch-Amhara relations", pp. 96-115 in The Southern Marches of Imperial Ethiopia (ed. Donald L. Donham and Wendy James), Oxford: James Currey, 2002.

External links

• Going Tribal - "Crocodile Hunting", a look at the Dassanech (Anthropology.net)