Suri (''Churi, Dhuri, Shuri, Shuro''), is a
Surmic language spoken in the
West Omo Zone of the
South West Ethiopia Peoples' Region
The Southwest Ethiopia Region, officially the Southwest Ethiopia Peoples' Regional State () is a regional state in southwestern Ethiopia. It was split off from the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' Region (SNNPR) on 23 November 2021 ...
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 ...
, to the
South Sudan
South Sudan (), officially the Republic of South Sudan, is a landlocked country in East Africa. It is bordered on the north by Sudan; on the east by Ethiopia; on the south by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda and Kenya; and on the ...
border by the
Suri. The language has over 80%
lexical similarity
In linguistics, lexical similarity is a measure of the degree to which the word sets of two given languages are similar. A lexical similarity of 1 (or 100%) would mean a total overlap between vocabularies, whereas 0 means there are no common words. ...
to
Mursi.
The language is often referred to by another form of its name, Surma, after which the Surmic branch of Eastern Sudanic is named, but that form is frequently used for the three related languages spoken by the
Surma people
Suri is a collective name for three ethnic groups (Chai, Timaga, and Baale) mainly living in Suri woreda, in southwestern Ethiopia. They share many similarities politically, territorially, culturally and economically but speak different language ...
: Suri, Mursi, and Me'en.
Suri is spoken in two dialect by two nationalities, the
Tirma (Tirmaga, Cirma, Dirma, Terema, Terna, Tid, Tirima, Tirmagi) and the
Chai (Caci, Cai).
Phonology
Consonants
* /É—/ may also be heard as a retroflex implosive
��among the Chai dialect.
* /ʃ/ variant of
among speakers in the Tirmaga dialect. In the Chai dialect, it is heard as a separate phoneme.
* /ɾ/ can be heard as a trill
in word-final positions.
* /b, É¡/ can be heard as
�, ɣin intervocalic positions.
* Implosives /É“, É—/ are heard as plosive sounds
, tin pre-consonantal and word-final positions.
* Sounds /b, ÉŸ, É¡/ are devoiced as
, c, kpre-consonantal word-final.
* Some speakers of the Chai dialect may pronounce /s, z/ as dental fricatives
�, ð
* /j/ can be heard as a fricative
�among older speakers in different positions.
* A glottal stop
�may be heard in word-final position in connected speech.
Vowels
* /i, u/ can be heard as
�, ʊin closed syllables.
References
Bibliography
* Abbink, Jon, Michael Bryant & Daniel Bambu. 2013.
Suri Orature An Introduction to the Society, Language and Oral Culture of the Suri People (Southwest Ethiopia).'' Cologne: R. Köppe Publishers, 203 pp..
*Bryant, Mike and Bargola Olekibo, compilers. 1997. ''Surichen ko aranjacan ko golacan (Suri–English–Amharic dictionary)''. 2nd ed. S.l.: Surma Translation Project. 65 p.
*
*
*Unseth, Peter. 1997. "Disentangling the Two Languages Called 'Suri'". ''Occasional Papers in the Study of Sudanese Languages'' 7: 49-69.
*Last, Marco and Deborah Lucassen. 1998. "Violence and Political Discourse Among the Chai Suri". in: Dimmendaal, Gerrit and Marco Last (eds.) ''Surmic Languages and Cultures''. Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, Köln. pp. 323.
External links
Endangered Languages Project -- Suri
Surma People
Suri basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
Languages of Ethiopia
Surmic languages
{{ns-lang-stub