This article describes the
phonology
Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often pre ...
of the
Oromo language
Oromo, historically also called Galla, is an Afroasiatic language belonging to the Cushitic branch, primarily spoken by the Oromo people, native to the Ethiopian state of Oromia; and northern Kenya. It is used as a lingua franca in Oromia an ...
.
Consonants
The Oromo language has 24 to 28 consonant phonemes depending on the dialect.
is a
voiced retroflex plosive. It may have an
implosive quality for some speakers.
The voiceless stops and are always aspirated.
and are
dental
The velar fricative is mainly used in the eastern dialect (Harar) as a phoneme. It is represented as in the
Oromo script (''Qubee'') though it is pronounced as a in most other dialects.
Vowels
Oromo has five vowels which all contrast long and short vowels. Sometimes there is a change in vowel quality when the vowel is short. Short vowels tend to be more centralized than their counterparts.
Though sometimes diphthongs may occur, there are none that occur in a word's unaltered form.
Tone
When needed, the conventions for marking tone in written Oromo are as follows:
*
acute accent
The acute accent (), ,
is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin alphabet, Latin, Cyrillic script, Cyrillic, and Greek alphabet, Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accen ...
- high tone
*
grave accent
The grave accent () ( or ) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, Catalan and many other Western European languages as well as for a few unusual uses in English. It is also used in other ...
- low tone
*
circumflex
The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from "bent around"a translation of ...
- falling tone
Tones on long vowels are marked on the first vowel symbol.
In Oromo, the tone-bearing unit is the
mora rather than the vowel of the syllable. A long vowel or a diphthong consists of two morae and can bear two tones. Each mora is defined as being of high or low tone. Only one high tone occurs per word and this must be on the final or penultimate mora. Particles do not have a high tone. (These include prepositions, clitic pronouns for subject and object, impersonal subject pronouns and focus markers.) There are therefore three possible "accentual patterns" in word roots.
Phonetically there are three tones: high, low and falling. Rules:
# On a long vowel, a sequence of high-low is realized as a falling tone.
# On a long vowel, a sequence of low-high is realized as high-high. (Occasionally it is a rising tone.)
This use of tone may be characterized as
pitch accent
A pitch-accent language is a type of language that, when spoken, has certain syllables in words or morphemes that are prominent, as indicated by a distinct contrasting pitch (music), pitch (tone (linguistics), linguistic tone) rather than by vol ...
. It is similar to that in
Somali.
Stress is connected with tone. The high tone has strong stress; the falling tone has less stress and the low tone has no stress.
Phonological processes
Allophones
* becomes between two vowels.
* becomes between two vowels.
* is pronounced as a
voiceless velar fricative
The voiceless velar fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It was part of the consonant inventory of Old English and can still be found in some dialects of English, most notably in Scottish English, e.g. in ''lo ...
before and .
* The and (i.e. the Arabic
ḪÄʾ) are used interchangeably in the Borana dialect.
* In the
Goma
Goma is a city in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is the Capital city, capital and largest city of the North Kivu, North Kivu Province; it is located on the northern shore of Lake Kivu and shares borders with the Bukumu Chiefdo ...
dialect, vowels are
nasalized before and ,
Epenthesis
When a vowel occurs in word-initial position, a glottal stop () is inserted before it.
Elision
* is dropped before .
* are dropped before .
Sandhi
Phonological changes occur at morpheme boundaries (
sandhi
Sandhi ( ; , ) is any of a wide variety of sound changes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. Examples include fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of one sound depending on nearby sounds or the grammatical function o ...
) for specific grammatical morphemes. There may be assimilation.
* The cluster becomes a
geminated .
* becomes
* assimilates into the proceeding , and .
* becomes between vowels
References
Works cited
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Oromo Phonology
Oromo language
Afroasiatic phonologies