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Mao People
The Mao languages are a branch of the Omotic languages spoken in Ethiopia. The group had the following categories: *Bambasi, spoken in the Bambasi woreda of Benishangul-Gumuz Region, * Hozo and Seze (often described together as 'Begi Mao'), spoken around Begi in the Mirab (West) Welega Zone of the Oromia Region, and * Ganza, which is spoken south of Bambasi in the Asosa Zone of Benishangul-Gumuz Region and west of the Hozo and Seze languages. It is estimated that there are 5,000 speakers of Bambasi, 3,000 speakers each of Hozo and Seze and a few hundred Ganza speakers (Bender, 2000). During recent political upheavals, a few thousand Bambassi speakers established themselves in the valley of the Didessa River and Belo Jegonfoy woreda. Much of the Mirab Welega Zone was once the home of Mao languages, but they have lost speakers because of the increasing influence of Oromo. Contact Mao languages are in close contact with Koman languages The Koman languages are a small close-k ...
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Ethiopia
Ethiopia, , om, Itiyoophiyaa, so, Itoobiya, ti, ኢትዮጵያ, Ítiyop'iya, aa, Itiyoppiya officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east and northeast, Kenya to the south, South Sudan to the west, and Sudan to the northwest. Ethiopia has a total area of . As of 2022, it is home to around 113.5 million inhabitants, making it the 13th-most populous country in the world and the 2nd-most populous in Africa after Nigeria. The national capital and largest city, Addis Ababa, lies several kilometres west of the East African Rift that splits the country into the African and Somali tectonic plates. Anatomically modern humans emerged from modern-day Ethiopia and set out to the Near East and elsewhere in the Middle Paleolithic period. Southwestern Ethiopia has been proposed as a possible homeland of the Afroasiatic langua ...
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Ganza Language
Ganza, also known as Ganzo or Koma, is an Omotic language spoken in the Al Kurumik District of the Blue Nile (state) in Sudan and in the western Benishangul-Gumuz region of Ethiopia, specifically in the village districts of Penishuba and Yabeldigis. It also goes by the names Ganzo, Gwami, Koma, and Koma-Ganza. Phonology Ganza does not utilize consonant length phonemically. Although vowel length is typically contrastive in Omotic languages The Omotic languages are a group of languages spoken in southwestern Ethiopia, in the Omo River region. The Ge'ez script is used to write some of the Omotic languages, the Latin script for some others. They are fairly agglutinative and have com ..., Ganza does not have a clear contrast between long and short vowel phonemes. Instead, Ganza has predictable utterance-final vowel lengthening and a set of monosyllabic words with double vowels. References *Smolders, Joshua. 2015. ''A Wordlist of Ganza''. Addis Ababa: SIL Ethiopia Notes ...
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Language Families
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'', called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree, or in a subsequent modification, to species in a phylogenetic tree of evolutionary taxonomy. Linguists therefore describe the ''daughter languages'' within a language family as being ''genetically related''. According to ''Ethnologue'' there are 7,151 living human languages distributed in 142 different language families. A living language is defined as one that is the first language of at least one person. The language families with the most speakers are: the Indo-European family, with many widely spoken languages native to Europe (such as English and Spanish) and South Asia (such as Hindi and Bengali); and the Sino-Tibetan fa ...
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Languages Of Ethiopia
The languages of Ethiopia include the official languages of Ethiopia, its national and regional languages, and a large number of minority languages, as well as foreign languages. Overview There are 92 individual languages indigenous to Ethiopia according to Ethnologue, with the 1994 Ethiopian census indicating that some 77 tongues were spoken locally. Most of these languages belong to the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic family (Semitic languages, Semitic and Cushitic languages; Omotic languages are also spoken, but their classification as Afroasiatic remains disputed). Additionally, Nilo-Saharan languages are spoken by what the government calls the Nilotic peoples, "Nilotic" people, though scholars distinguish Nilotic from the Surmic languages, Gumuz languages, and Koman languages spoken in Ethiopia. Of the languages spoken in Ethiopia, 91 are living and 1 is extinct. 41 of the living languages are institutional, 14 are developing, 18 are vigorous, 8 are in danger of extinc ...
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Koman Languages
The Koman languages are a small close-knit family of languages located along the Ethiopia–Sudan border with about 50,000 speakers. They are conventionally classified as part of the Nilo-Saharan family. However, due to the paucity of evidence, many scholars treat it as an independent language family. Among scholars who do accept its inclusion within Nilo-Saharan, opinions vary as to their position within it. Koman languages in Ethiopia are in close contact with the Omotic Mao languages. In Ethiopia, some Koman-speaking groups also consider themselves to be ethnically Mao. Internal classification The Koman languages are: *Koman ** Uduk, or T’wampa, (formerly in South Sudan)—about 20,000 speakers, most at a large refugee camp at Bonga, near Gambela ** Kwama (Ethiopia)—about 15,000 speakers, mainly in Benishangul-Gumuz ** Komo ( Sudan)—about 12,000 speakers mainly in An Nil al Azraq ** Opuuo (Opo), or Shita (Ethiopia)—spoken in 5 villages north of the Nuer by abo ...
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Oromo Language
Oromo ( or ; Oromo: ''Afaan Oromoo''), in the linguistic literature of the early 20th century also called Galla (a name with a pejorative meaning and therefore rejected by the Oromo people), is an Afroasiatic language that belongs to the Cushitic branch. It is native to the Ethiopian state of Oromia and Northern Kenya and is spoken predominantly by the Oromo people and neighboring ethnic groups in the Horn of Africa. It is used as a lingua franca particularly in Ethiopia and northeastern Kenya. With more than 36 million speakers making up 33.8% of the total Ethiopian population, Oromo has the largest number of native speakers in Ethiopia, and ranks as the second most widely spoken language in Ethiopia by total number of speakers (including second-language speakers) following Amharic. Forms of Oromo are spoken as a first language by an additional half-million people in parts of northern and eastern Kenya. It is also spoken by smaller numbers of emigrants in other African count ...
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Belo Jegonfoy
Bolo Jiganfo is one of the 20 Districts of Ethiopia, or ''woredas'', in the Benishangul-Gumuz region of Ethiopia. Part of the Kamashi Zone, it is bordered on the west by the Didessa River, which separates it from Kamashi, on the north by the Hanger River which separates it from Yaso, and by Oromia region in the east and south; parts of the woreda are enclaves in the Oromia region. Demographics The 2007 national census reported a total population for this woreda of 30,143, of whom 15,983 were men and 14,160 were women; 2,762 or 9.16% of its population were urban dwellers. The majority of the inhabitants said they practiced Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity, with 46.39% of the population reporting they observed this belief, while 44.55% of the population were Protestant, 4.57% were Muslim, 2.15% practiced traditional beliefs, and 1.55% were Catholic. Based on figures from the Central Statistical Agency in 2005, this woreda has an estimated total population of 14,943, of whom 7,624 ar ...
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Didessa River
The Didessa River (pronounced: ɗeɗ:e:s:a; om, Dhedheessa) is a river in western Ethiopia. A tributary of the Abay River, it rises in the mountains of Gomma, flowing in a northwestern direction to its confluence where the course of the Abay has curved to its southernmost point before turning northwards at about . The Didessa's drainage area is about 19,630 square kilometers, covering portions of the Benishangul-Gumuz Region and the West Welega Zone of the Oromia Region. Tributaries on the right bank include the Enareya, Aet, Wama, and the Angar rivers; on the left side the most important tributary is the Dobana River. Exploring this river in the mid-1890s and from interviews with local inhabitants, Alexander Bulatovich asserted that downstream of its junction with the Angar, the Didessa is rapid-free and potentially navigable. Human history The early 20th-century explorer Herbert Weld Blundell opined that "Didessa" appears to have replaced a much older name for this river, ...
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Asosa Zone
Assosa is a zone in Benishangul-Gumuz Region of Ethiopia. This Zone was named after the Assosa Sultanate, which had approximately the same boundaries. Assosa is bordered on the south by the Mao-Komo special woreda, on the west by Sudan, and on the northeast by the Kamashi. The largest town in this zone is Assosa. Its highest point is Mount Bambasi, located in the woreda of the same name. The majority ethnic group in the zone is the Berta people. The area Assosa occupies came under Ethiopian control in 1898, when Emperor Menelik II skillfully exploited the traditional rivalry of the three local rulers, Sheikh Ejail al-Hassan of Asosa, Sheikh Mahmud of Komosha and Sheikh Abd al-Rahman Al-Ejail of Bela-Shangul proper. When Ethiopia and the British administration of Sudan demarcated their common border in 1902, this finalized their annexation. Demographics Based on the 2007 Census conducted by the Central Statistical Agency of Ethiopia (CSA), this Zone has a total population of 31 ...
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Oromia Region
Oromia (Amharic: ) ( om, Oromiyaa) is a regional state in Ethiopia and the homeland of the Oromo people. The capital of Oromia is Addis Ababa. It is bordered by the Somali Region to the east; the Amhara Region, the Afar Region and the Benishangul-Gumuz Region to the north; Dire Dawa to the northeast; the South Sudanese state of Upper Nile, Gambela Region, South West Ethiopia Region, Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' Region and Sidama Region to the west; the Eastern Province of Kenya to the south; as well as Addis Ababa as an enclave surrounded by a Special Zone in its centre and the Harari Region as an enclave surrounded by East Hararghe in its east. In August 2013, the Ethiopian Central Statistics Agency projected the 2022 population of Oromia as 35,467,001; making it the largest regional state by population. It is also the largest regional state covering Oromia is the world's 42nd most populous subnational entity, and the most populous subnational entity i ...
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Omotic Languages
The Omotic languages are a group of languages spoken in southwestern Ethiopia, in the Omo River region. The Ge'ez script is used to write some of the Omotic languages, the Latin script for some others. They are fairly agglutinative and have complex tonal systems (for example, the Bench language). The languages have around 6.2 million speakers. The group is generally classified as belonging to the Afroasiatic language family, but this is disputed by some. Four separate "Omotic" groups are accepted by ''Glottolog'' 4.0 and Güldemann (2018): Ta-Ne-Omotic, Dizoid (Maji), Mao, and Aroid ("South Omotic"). Languages The North and South Omotic branches ("Nomotic" and "Somotic") are universally recognized, with some dispute as to the composition of North Omotic. The primary debate is over the placement of the Mao languages. Bender (2000) classifies Omotic languages as follows: *South Omotic / Aroid ( Hamer-Banna, Aari, Dime, Karo) *North Omotic / Non-Aroid ** Mao *** Bambassi * ...
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