Afar language

Afar (Afar: Qafaraf; also known as ’Afar Af, Afaraf, Qafar af) is an Afroasiatic language belonging to the Cushitic branch. It is spoken by the Afar people inhabiting Djibouti, Eritrea and Ethiopia.

"Qafar" redirects here. For the village in Iran, see Qafar, Iran.
Afar
Qafar af
Native toDjibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia
RegionHorn of Africa
EthnicityAfar people
Native speakers
2.5 million (2018–2020)[1]
DialectsAussa
Ba'adu
Central Afar
Northern Afar
Latin
Official status
Official language in
 Ethiopia
Recognised minority
language in
Language codes
ISO 639-1aa
ISO 639-2aar
ISO 639-3aar
Glottologafar1241

Classification

Afar is classified within the Cushitic branch of the Afroasiatic family. It is further categorized in the Lowland East Cushitic sub-group, along with Saho and Somali.[2] Its closest relative is the Saho language.[1]

Geographic distribution

The Afar language is spoken as a mother tongue by the Afar people in Djibouti, Eritrea, and the Afar Region of Ethiopia.[1]

According to Ethnologue, there are 2,600,000 total Afar speakers. Of these, 1,280,000 were recorded in the 2007 Ethiopian census, with 906,000 monolinguals registered in the 1994 census.[1]

Official status

In Djibouti, Afar is a recognized national language.[3] It is also one of the broadcasting languages of the Radio Television of Djibouti public network.

In Eritrea, Afar is recognized as one of nine national languages which formally enjoy equal status although Tigrinya and Arabic are by far of greatest significance in official usage. There are daily broadcasts on the national radio and a translated version of the Eritrean constitution. In education, however, Afar speakers prefer Arabic – which many of them speak as a second language – as the language of instruction.[4]

In the Afar Region of Ethiopia, Afar is also recognized as an official working language.[5] Since 2020, Afar is one of the five official working languages of Ethiopia.[6]

Phonology

Consonants

The consonants of the Afar language in the standard orthography are listed below in brackets (preceded by the IPA notation):

Labial Alveolar Retroflex Palatal Velar Pharyngeal Glottal
Plosive voiceless t ⟨t⟩ k ⟨k⟩
voiced b ⟨b⟩ d ⟨d⟩ ɡ ⟨g⟩
Fricative voiceless f ⟨f⟩ s ⟨s⟩ ħ ⟨c⟩ h ⟨h⟩
voiced ʕ ⟨q⟩
Nasal m ⟨m⟩ n ⟨n⟩
Approximant w ⟨w⟩ l ⟨l⟩ j ⟨y⟩
Tap ɾ ⟨r⟩ ɽ ⟨x⟩[7]

Voiceless stop consonants which close syllables are released, e.g., [ʌkʰˈme].

Vowels and stress
Front Central Back
shortlonglong shortlong
Close i ⟨i⟩iː ⟨ii⟩ u ⟨u⟩uː ⟨uu⟩
Mid e ⟨e⟩eː ⟨ee⟩ o ⟨o⟩oː ⟨oo⟩
Open aː ⟨aa⟩ ʌ ⟨a⟩

Sentence final vowels of affirmative verbs are aspirated (and stressed), e.g.

  • abeh = /aˈbeʰ/ 'He did.'

Sentence final vowels of negative verbs are not aspirated (nor stressed), e.g.

  • maabinna = /ˈmaabinna/ 'He did not do.'

Sentence final vowels of interrogative verbs are lengthened (and stressed), e.g.

  • abee? = /aˈbeː/ 'Did he do?'

Otherwise, stress in word-final.

Phonotactics

Possible syllable shapes are V, VV, VC, VVC, CV, CVV and CVVC.[8]

Syntax

As in most other Cushitic languages, the basic word order in Afar is subject–object–verb.[1]

Writing system

In Ethiopia, Afar used to be written with the Ge'ez script (Ethiopic script). Since around 1849, the Latin script has been used in other areas to transcribe the language.[1] Additionally, Afar is also transcribed using the Arabic script.[9]

In the early 1970s, two Afar intellectuals and nationalists, Dimis and Redo, formalized the Afar alphabet. Known as Qafar Feera, the orthography is based on the Latin script.[10]

Officials from the Institut des Langues de Djibouti, the Eritrean Ministry of Education, and the Ethiopian Afar Language Studies and Enrichment Center have since worked with Afar linguists, authors and community representatives to select a standard orthography for Afar from among the various existing writing systems used to transcribe the language.[9]

Latin alphabet
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
abacadaefagahaijakalamanaopaqarasatauvawaxayaza
[11]
ABTSECKXIDQRFGOLMNUWHY
abatasaecakaxaidaqarafagaolamanauwahaya
[12]

See also
For a list of words relating to in Afar, see the Afar language category of words in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Notes
  1. Afar at Ethnologue (25th ed., 2022) closed access
  2. Lewis, I. (1998). Peoples of the Horn of Africa: Somali, Afar and Saho. Red Sea Press. p. 11.
  3. "Djibouti". The World Factbook. CIA. Retrieved 31 August 2014.
  4. Simeone-Senelle, Marie-Claude. "Les langues en Erythrée". Chroniques Yeménites 8, 2000 (in French). Cy.revues.org.
  5. Kizitus Mpoche; Tennu Mbuh, eds. (2006). Language, literature, and identity. Cuvillier. pp. 163–164. ISBN 3-86537-839-0.
  6. Getachew, Samuel. "Ethiopia is adding four more official languages to Amharic as political instability mounts". Quartz. Retrieved 2022-04-12.
  7. Hamann, Silke; Fuchs, Susanne (June 2010) [2008]. "How do voiced retroflex stops evolve? Evidence from typology and an articulatory study". Language and Speech. 53 (2): 181–216. doi:10.1177/0023830909357159. PMID 20583729. S2CID 23502367.
  8. Kamil, Mohamed Hassan (2015). Afar : grammatical description of a Cuchitic Language (Djibouti, Eritrea and Ethiopia ) (Theses thesis). Université Sorbonne Paris Cité.
  9. "Development of the Afar Language" (PDF). Afar Friends. Archived from the original (PDF) on 5 March 2012. Retrieved 23 August 2013.
  10. "Afar (ʿAfár af)". Omniglot. Retrieved 23 August 2013.
  11. "Berraka". Qafaraf. Archived from the original on 2015-08-11. Retrieved 2015-08-23.
  12. "Afar language, alphabet and pronunciation". Omniglot. Archived from the original on 2021-07-09. Retrieved 2021-09-29.

Bibliography
  • Loren F. Bliese. 1976. "Afar", The Non-Semitic Languages of Ethiopia. Ed. Lionel M. Bender. Ann Arbor, Michigan: African Studies Center, Michigan State University. Pages 133–164.
  • Loren F. Bliese. 1981. A generative grammar of Afar. Summer Institute of Linguistics publications in linguistics vol. 65. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics and The University of Texas at Arlington. ISBN 0-88312-083-6.
  • J. G. Colby. 1970. "Notes on the northern dialect of the Afar language", Journal of Ethiopian Studies 8:1–8.
  • R. J. Hayward and Enid M. Parker. 1985. Afar-English-French dictionary with Grammatical Notes in English. London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
  • Richard J. Hayward. 1998. "Qafar (West Cushitic)", Handbook of Morphology. Ed. A. Spencer and A. Zwicky. Oxford: Blackwell. Pages 624–647.
  • Didier Morin. 1997. Poésie traditionnelle des Afars. Langues et cultures africaines, 21 / SELAF vol. 363. Paris/Louvain: Peeters.
  • Enid M. Parker. 2006. English–Afar Dictionary. Washington DC: Dunwoody Press.
  • Rainer M. Voigt. 1975. "Bibliographie des Saho–Afar", Africana Marburgensia 8:53–63.
Afar language test of Wikipedia at Wikimedia Incubator
For a list of words relating to Afar language, see the Afar language category of words in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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