Sheko 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 ...

language of the

Afro-Asiatic 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 s ...

language family spoken in the area between Tepi and

Mizan Teferi Mizan Tefere (also called simply Mizan) is the largest town in South West Ethiopia Peoples' Region and one of four Capital cities of the region. Mizan is also the administrative centre, of the Bench Sheko Zone in the South West Ethiopia Peoples ...

in western

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 ...

, in the Sheko district in the

Bench Maji Zone Bench Sheko (previously known as Bench Maji) is a zone in the South West Ethiopia Peoples' Region of Ethiopia. Bench Sheko is bordered on the south and southeast by West Omo, on the west by the Gambela Region on the north by Sheka, and on the e ...

. The 2007 census lists 38,911 speakers; the 1998 census listed 23,785 speakers, with 13,611 identified as monolinguals. Sheko, together with the Dizi and

Nayi language Nayi (also known as "Nao") is an Omotic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family spoken in western Ethiopia. Most of the speakers of the language live in two separated areas. The largest grouping live in Decha woreda of the Keffa Zone. The ...

s, is part of a cluster of languages variously called "Maji" or " Dizoid". The language is notable for its

retroflex consonant A retroflex ( /ˈɹɛtʃɹoːflɛks/), apico-domal ( /əpɪkoːˈdɔmɪnəl/), or cacuminal () consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated between the alveolar ridge and the h ...

s (Aklilu Yilma 1988), a striking feature shared with closely related Dizi and nearby (but not closely related) Bench (Breeze 1988).

Phonology

Apart from the above-mentioned retroflex consonants, the phonology of Sheko is characterized by a total 28 consonant phonemes, five long vowels and six short vowels, plus four phonemic tone levels.

Consonants

Hellenthal (2010, p. 45) lists the following consonant phonemes of Sheko: Unlike other Dizoid languages, Sheko has no contrast between and . Consonants are rarely geminated, and there is a

syllabic nasal A syllabic consonant or vocalic consonant is a consonant that forms a syllable on its own, like the ''m'', ''n'' and ''l'' in some pronunciations of the English words ''rhythm'', ''button'' and ''bottle''. To represent it, the understroke diacrit ...

Vowels

Hellenthal (2010, p. 56) lists the following long and short vowels of Sheko: , , , , , , , , , .

Tones

Sheko is one of very few languages in Africa that have four distinct

phonemic tone Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emph ...

levels. Tone distinguishes meaning both in the lexicon and in the grammar, particularly to distinguish persons in the pronominal system.Hellenthal 2010, p. 113

Grammar

Ethnologue ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' (stylized as ''Ethnoloɠue'') is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensi ...

'' lists the following morphosyntactic features: "SOV; postpositions; genitives, articles, adjectives, numerals, relatives after noun heads; question word initial; 1 prefix, 5 suffixes; word order distinguishes subjects, objects, indirect objects; affixes indicate case of noun phrases; verb affixes mark person, number, gender of subject; passives, causatives, comparatives."

Notes

References

* Breeze, Mary. 1988. "Phonological features of Gimira and Dizi." In Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst and Fritz Serzisko (eds.), Cushitic – Omotic: papers from the International Symposium on Cushitic and Omotic languages, Cologne, January 6–9, 1986, 473–487. Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag. * Hellenthal, Anneke Christine. 2009. Handout on Sheko subject clitics
download
* * * Yilma, Aklilu, Ralph Siebert and Kati Siebert. 2002
"Sociolinguistic survey of the Omotic languages Sheko and Yem."
SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2002-053.

External links

Sheko basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database

ELAR archive of Guraferdan Sheko
{{Omotic languages Languages of Ethiopia Tonal languages Dizoid languages