Kafa or Kefa (''Kafi noono'') is a North Omotic language spoken in

Ethiopia Ethiopia, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa region of East Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Ken ...

at the Keffa Zone. It is part of the Ethiopian Language Area, with SOV word order, ejective consonants, etc. A collection of proverbs in the language has been published by Mesfin Wodajo.

Phonology

Consonants

* /f/ may also be heard as �in free variation. * /b/ can be heard as a bilabial approximant �̞in intervocalic positions. * /t/ can be realized as sin word-final position.

Vowels

* /a/ may also have an allophone of �

Manjo

Within the Kafa culture there is a

caste A caste is a Essentialism, fixed social group into which an individual is born within a particular system of social stratification: a caste system. Within such a system, individuals are expected to marry exclusively within the same caste (en ...

of traditional hunters called the Manja/Manjo 'hunters'. They may once have spoken a different language. However, Leikola has shown that currently they speak Kafa with a number of distinctive words and constructions that they use, reinforcing the distinctions between themselves and the larger Kafa society.Leikola, Kirsi. 2014. ''Talking Manjo: Linguistic repertoires as means of negotiating marginalization.'' University of Helsinki: PhD dissertation.

References

External links

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-RO ...