Dime or Dima is an

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 ...

language spoken in the northern part of the Selamago district in the

Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region The Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' Region (often abbreviated as SNNPR; am, የደቡብ ብሔር ብሔረሰቦችና ሕዝቦች ክልል, Yädäbub Bḥer Bḥeräsäbočna Hzboč Kllə) is a regional state in southwestern ...

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 Er ...

, around Mount Smith. Dime divides into at least two dialects, which include Us'a and Gerfa. It has six case suffixes in addition to an unmarked nominative. It is overwhelmingly suffixing, but uses prefixes for demonstratives and reduplication. Phonologically, it is noteworthy among the

Omotic languages 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 c ...

for having velar and uvular fricative phonemes. The basic word order is SOV (subject–object–verb), as in other Omotic languages, indeed as in all the languages of the core of the Ethiopian Language Area. The language, as well as the Dime people themselves, reportedly decreased in numbers over the 20th century due to predation from their neighbors the Bodi, and both are in danger of extinction. According to Ethiopian census figures, the 1994 census reported 6293 speakers of the Dime language in the

Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples' Region The Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' Region (often abbreviated as SNNPR; am, የደቡብ ብሔር ብሔረሰቦችና ሕዝቦች ክልል, Yädäbub Bḥer Bḥeräsäbočna Hzboč Kllə) is a regional state in southwestern ...

alone;''1994 Population and Housing Census of Ethiopia: Results for Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples' Region'', Vol. 1, part 1
Table 2.14 in the 2007 census, only 574 speakers were reported for all of Ethiopia. Further, because the Dime language still lacks a writing system and there are no local schools to promote the use of the language, it is even more threatened.

References

External links

* Yilma, Aklilu and Ralph Siebert (2002)
"Sociolinguistic survey report of the Chara, Dime, Melo and Nayi languages of Ethiopia part 1."
SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2002-029. * Ralph Siebert (2002)
"Sociolinguistic survey report on the Dime language of Ethiopia."
SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2002-043 *

World Atlas of Language Structures The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) is a database of structural ( phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials. It was first published by Oxford University Press as a book with CD-R ...

information o
Dime
{{Omotic languages Languages of Ethiopia Aroid languages