Nayi (also known as "Nao") is an
Omotic language of the
Afro-Asiatic language family spoken in western
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 ...
.
Most of the speakers of the language live in two separated areas. The largest grouping live in
Decha woreda
Districts of Ethiopia, also called woredas (; ''woreda''), are the third level of the administrative divisions of Ethiopia – after ''List of zones of Ethiopia, zones'' and the ''Regions of Ethiopia, regional states''.
These districts are f ...
of the
Keffa Zone. The nearest city to their region is
Bonga. A few in Dulkuma village of the Shoa Bench woreda, some in
Sheko woreda having moved there in 1976-1977 as a result of conflicts between local feudal lords and the military government (Aklilu 2002:4). In Decha, young people no longer speak the language.
The language is notable for its
retroflex consonant
A retroflex () 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 hard palate. They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consona ...
s (Aklilu Yilma 1988), a striking feature shared with closely related
Dizi,
Sheko and nearby (but not closely related)
Bench. The language has 5 vowels that can be long or short. The question of the status of a short mid central vowel is still unresolved. There are three phonemic tones and syllabic nasal consonants. There are
ejective stops and affricates, but no
implosives (Aklilu 2002:6,7).
Nayi, together with the
Dizi and
Sheko languages, is part of a cluster of languages variously called "Maji" or "
Dizoid"
Andualem Adal Tessema said that according to Aklilu (1990), Naayì has twenty nine consonant phonemes and two Syllabic nasals n and m which carry tone. It is also indicated that consonant gemination is phonemic in Naayì and the language has three tonemes: high, mid and low. Regarding the vowel phonemes, Naayì has six short vowel phonemes i, e, ä, a, u, o and five long vowel phonemes i:, e:, a:, u:, o:. He remarks that the status of the short vowel ä in Naayì needs further investigations; and its long counterpart is not found in the language.
Notes
References
*Aklilu Yilma. 1990. Two phonological processes in Nayi: palatalization and labialization. In Tadesse Beyene, Richard Pankhurst, Ahmed Zekaria, eds., ''Proceedings of the Firstr National Conference of Ethiopian Studies''. Addis Ababa: Addis Ababa University.
*Aklilu Yilma. 1994. "A sketch of the Nayi grammar." S.L.L.E. linguistic reports 16: 1-20.
*Aklilu Yilma. 2002
"Sociolinguistic survey report of the Nayi language of Ethiopia." SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2002-010.
* Aklilu Yilma and Ralph Siebert. 1995. "Survey of Chara, Dime, Melo and Nayi, part 1." S.L.L.E. linguistic reports 25: 2-8.
* Andualem Adal Tessema 2020 A Descriptive Syntax of Naayì page 10
External links
Nayi basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
Languages of Ethiopia
Dizoid languages
{{AfroAsiatic-lang-stub