The Omotic languages are Afro-Asiatic languages spoken in northeast Africa. Most Omotic speakers live in southwestern Ethiopia. The Omotic languages are fairly agglutinative.
The Geez alphabet is used to write such Omotic languages as are written.
Lionel Bender (2000) classifies this group as follows:
Ometo languages (among them Wolaytta, Zayse, and Basketto)
Apart from terminology, this differs from Harold Fleming's earlier (1976) classification in including the Mao languages, whose affiliation had originally been controversial, and in abolishing the "Gimojan" group. There are also differences in the subclassification of Ometo, which is not given here.
The Omotic languages were formerly classified as the West subgroup of the Cushitic languages, but as more data became available, Harold Fleming proposed that they constituted a separate subgroup of Afro-Asiatic, and this has become the prevalent view. Whether the old Cushitic language family should be split in two in this way is still controversial among some linguists; others, conversely, such as Paul Newman, regard its differences from other Afro-Asiatic languages as so great as to cast doubt on its very inclusion in the phylum, and regard it as being, at closest, the phylum's most distant branch.
They should not be confused with the unrelated Omotik language, a nearly extinct Nilotic language of Tanzania with a similar name.
In Ethiopia, this language is Amharic, a Semitic tongue.
The Omoticlanguages of the Omo River Valley are Afro-Asiatic but closely related to the Cushitic languages.
In multi-ethnic nations such as Ethiopia, the use of an "official" language is sometimes criticised on the basis of its representing only a certain part of the population, with the minority populations reacting against the dominance of a foreign tongue.
The Afro-Asiatic languages are a language family of about 240 languages and 285 million people widespread throughout North Africa, East Africa, the Sahel, and Southwest Asia.
The Ongota language is often considered to be Afro-Asiatic, but its classification within the family remains controversial (partly for lack of data).
Tonal languages are found in the Omotic, Chadic, and South and East Cushitic branches of Afro-Asiatic, according to Ehret (1996).
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