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.
The Cushiticlanguages are a subgroup of the Afro-Asiatic languages phylum, named after the Biblical figure Cush by analogy with Semitic.
The most prominent language is Oromo with about 35 million speakers, followed by Somali (in Somalia, Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Kenya) with about 20 million speakers, Sidamo (in Ethiopia) with about 2 million speakers, and Afar (in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Djibouti) with about 1.5 million.
Cushitic was traditionally seen as also including the Omotic languages, then called WestCushitic, but this view has been largely abandoned; the Omotic languages are considered an isolated branch of Afro-Asiatic.
Feeds |
Contact