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Aweer (''Aweera''), also known as Boni (''Bon, Bonta''), is a
Cushitic language The Cushitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken primarily in the Horn of Africa, with minorities speaking Cushitic languages to the north in Egypt and the Sudan, and to the south in Kenya and Tanzania. As o ...
of Eastern
Kenya ) , national_anthem = "Ee Mungu Nguvu Yetu"() , image_map = , map_caption = , image_map2 = , capital = Nairobi , coordinates = , largest_city = Nairobi , ...
. The
Aweer people The Aweer (also known as the Waboni, Boni and Sanye) are a Cushitic ethnic group inhabiting the Coast Province in southeastern Kenya. Some members are also found in southern Somalia. They are indigenous foragers, traditionally subsisting on hunting ...
, known by the arguably derogatory
exonym An endonym (from Greek: , 'inner' + , 'name'; also known as autonym) is a common, ''native'' name for a geographical place, group of people, individual person, language or dialect, meaning that it is used inside that particular place, group, ...
"''Boni,''" are historically a
hunter-gatherer A traditional hunter-gatherer or forager is a human living an ancestrally derived lifestyle in which most or all food is obtained by foraging, that is, by gathering food from local sources, especially edible wild plants but also insects, fungi, ...
people, traditionally subsisting on hunting, gathering, and collecting honey. Their ancestral lands range along the Kenyan coast from the
Lamu Lamu or Lamu Town is a small town on Lamu Island, which in turn is a part of the Lamu Archipelago in Kenya. Situated by road northeast of Mombasa that ends at Mokowe Jetty, from where the sea channel has to be crossed to reach Lamu Island. ...
and
Ijara Ijara is a town and Sub-County in Garissa County, Kenya. It was previously capital of the former Ijara District. It is located 100 km north of Lamu and 180 km south of Garissa. Alternate meanings ''Ijara'' means rent in Arabic ...
Districts into Southern Somalia's Badaade District. According to ''
Ethnologue ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' (stylized as ''Ethnoloɠue'') is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensiv ...
'', there are around 8,000 speakers of Aweer. Aweer has similarities with the
Garre language Garre (also known as Af-Garre) is an Afro-Asiatic language spoken by the Garre people inhabiting southern Somalia, Ethiopia and northern Kenya. It belongs to the family's Cushitic branch, and has an estimated 2.5 million speakers. Garre language ...
,Ethnologue - Garre language
/ref> however, its speakers are ethnically distinct from Garre speakers.


Historical situation

There is suggestions that the Aweer speech community are remnants of the early hunter-gatherer inhabitants of Eastern Africa; although this is not without debate among specialists and unlike the neighboring speakers of the Dahalo language, there is no concrete linguistic evidence of a shift from a prior language; it is best said that the possibility of said shift is more so based on assumptions regarding their status as foragers as opposed to linguistic evidence of the same sort found in neighboring languages. As noted in Heine (1982:141), the debate regarding the situation of if the Aweer have or have not shifted from a prior language is as follows: # The forest was inhabited by non-Sam(''East Omo-Tana'')-speaking people, who, as a result of contacts with Sam pastoralists along the forest fringes, adopted a Sam language. This would imply that the Boni relationship with the Sam people is merely a linguistic one; their cultural origin would have to be sought with those hunter-gatherers who lived in the forest prior to the arrival of the Eastern Sam. # Part of the Eastern Sam, i.e. the immediate ancestors of the Boni, entered the coastal forest and adopted a hunter-gatherer existence. Such a development is likely to have been caused by war, stock raiding or ecological distress, forcing the Same people to give up their livestock economy. Tosco (1994) notes that Heine agrees with the second historical scenario, and as Tosco (1994:155) goes on to state: Further on in the same paper, Tosco does note that there is oral traditions among the Aweer ethnic community that they had at one point had cattle and as a result of losing them (''and presumably their social status'') they had become foragers. A similar view can be found in Stiles (1988:41-42), and the general consensus is that while the actual origin of the Aweer and their language is something that is not known definitively, it is likely that they at one point were not foragers. A competing hypothesis, and perhaps equally plausible one in the same vein as Heine's first scenario, is put forth by Tosco (1994:159) that links the emergence of Aweer to the expansion of Garre-speakers from the northeast: He then notes that in a forthcoming work to be published, Tosco (1992), that there is loans of East Omo-Tana (''or in his words, "Somali"'') origin within Dahalo that could have only been loaned by either Aweer or Garre, such as the verb šir- (IPA: ir- to be there, to exist''' which demonstrates the sound change *k > /_i and the verb 'unneed- (IPA: unneːd '''to swallow''' which demonstrates another sound shift found in both Garre and Aweer, *ʕ > along with the semantic shift of '''to eat''' > '''to swallow'''; which itself is found in Aweer. Conversely, these could also be loans from Aweer into Dahalo. A similar viewpoint can be found in Nurse (2019).


Phonology

The phonemic inventory reconstructed for Proto-Aweer (''the last common stage of all Aweer dialects'') is as follows:


References


External links


AWEER


Further reading

* * {{Authority control Omo–Tana languages Languages of Kenya