Bambassi (native name: Màwés Aasʼè
) is an
Omotic
The Omotic languages are a group of languages spoken in southwestern Ethiopia, in the Omo River region. The Ge'ez script is used to write some of the Omotic languages, the Latin script for some others. They are fairly agglutinative and have co ...
Afroasiatic language
The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic), also known as Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic, and sometimes also as Afrasian, Erythraean or Lisramic, are a language family of about 300 languages that are spoken predominantly in the geographic su ...
spoken in
Ethiopia
Ethiopia, , om, Itiyoophiyaa, so, Itoobiya, ti, ኢትዮጵያ, Ítiyop'iya, aa, Itiyoppiya officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the ...
around the towns of
Bambasi and Didessa in the area east of
Asosa in
Benishangul-Gumuz Region
Benishangul-Gumuz ( am, ቤንሻንጉል ጉሙዝ, Benšangul Gumuz) is a regional state in northwestern Ethiopia to the border of Sudan. It was previously known as Region 6. The region's capital is Assosa. Following the adoption of the 1 ...
.
The parent language group is the
East Mao group. Alternative names for the language are Bambeshi, Siggoyo, Amam, Fadiro, Northern Mao, Didessa and Kere.
The most current information on the number of Bambassi speakers is not known, as the 2007 census grouped the Mao languages together, despite low lexical similarity. 33,683 mother tongue speakers of Maogna (covering Bambassi,
Hozo and
Seze) were listed.
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Similarities
Bambassi has a 31%
lexical similarity with other Omotic languages.
Phonology
Bambassi has 5 vowels: /a, e, i, o, u/. The vowels have lengthened forms, and Bambassi has contrastive vowel length.
Orthography
Vowels and tones
* a -
* aa -
ː* e -
* ee -
ː* i -
* ii -
ː* o -
* oo -
ː* u -
* uu -
ː* á - high tone
* a - middle tone
* à - low tone
Consonants
* b -
* c' -
͡s'* ch -
͡ʃ* d -
* g -
* h -
* k -
* k' -
'* l -
* m -
* n -
* ng -
* p -
/f/ɸ* p' -
'* r -
* s -
* sh -
* t -
* t' -
'* w -
* y -
* z -
Notes
Further reading
*Ahland, Michael. 2009
"Aspects of Northern Mao (Bambassi-Diddesa) phonology."'Linguistic Discovery'' 7: 1-42.
*Alemayehu Dumessa. 2007. ''Word Formation in Diddessa Mao''. Addis Ababa University, MA thesis
Web access*Wedekind, Charlotte, Klaus Wedekind and Ralph Siebert. 2002
"Third S.L.L.E. survey on languages of the Begi/Asosa area." SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2002-056
Languages of Ethiopia
Omotic languages
Mao languages
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