Azeb Amha (1967) is a linguist working on the morphology and syntax of Afroasiatic languages, with a special focus on

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 ...

. A senior researcher at the African Studies Center Leiden, Azeb is co-editor of the international ''Journal of African Languages and Linguistics'' (with

Felix Ameka Felix Ameka (1957) is a linguist working on the intersection of grammar, meaning and culture. His empirical specialisation is on West-African languages. He is currently professor of Ethnolinguistic Diversity and Vitality at Leiden University and ...

) and member of the board of the Dutch Society for African Studies (NVAS). After undergraduate studies at

Addis Ababa University Addis Ababa University (AAU) ( am, አዲስ አበባ ዩኒቨርሲቲ) is a national university located in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It is the oldest university in Ethiopia. AAU has thirteen campuses. Twelve of these are situated in Addis Ababa, ...

in Ethiopia, Azeb obtained her PhD degree from

Leiden University Leiden University (abbreviated as ''LEI''; nl, Universiteit Leiden) is a Public university, public research university in Leiden, Netherlands. The university was founded as a Protestant university in 1575 by William the Silent, William, Prince o ...

. Her thesis, a comprehensive grammar of the

Maale language Maale (also spelled Male) is an Omotic language spoken in the Omo Region of Ethiopia. The Maale people are maintaining their language vigorously, despite exposure to outside pressures and languages.Aswegen, Kobus van. 2008. The maintenance of ...

of South-West Ethiopia, was hailed as "an example of descriptive linguistics at its best". Her broad-ranging work since then has involved research on and audio-visual documentation of the linguistic and cultural heritage of the Oyda, Zargulla and Wolaitta peoples, whose languages belong to the

Omotic 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 ...

branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. In 2007, her research on language endangerment and audiovisual documentation (with Maarten Mous and Anne-Christie Hellenthal) was one of 7 finalists for the ''Academische Jaarprijs'' and in 2016, she was awarded a competitive research grant for a three year project of the Endangered Languages Documentation Project for the linguistic and ethnographic documentation of endangered cultural practices of the Zargulla people in South-West Ethiopia.

Key publications

* Amha, Azeb. 1996. 'Tone-accent and prosodic domains in Wolaitta'. ''Studies in African Linguistics'', 25(2). 111–138. * Amha, Azeb. 2001. ''The Maale Language'' (CNWS Publications 99). Leiden: Leiden University. * Amha, Azeb & Dimmendaal, Gerrit J. 2006. 'Converbs in an African perspective'. In Ameka, Felix K. & Dench, Alan & Evans, Nicholas (eds.), ''Catching Language. The standing challenge of grammar writing'', 393–440. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. * Amha, Azeb. 2012. 'Omotic'. In Frajzyngier, Zygmunt & Shay, Erin (eds.), ''The Afroasiatic Languages'', 423–504. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. * Amha, Azeb. 2013. Directives to humans and to domestic animals – the imperative and some interjections in Zargulla. In: Marie-Claude Simeone-Senelle and Martine Vanhove (eds.), Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Cushitic and Omotic Languages, Paris, 16–18 April 2008. Cologne: Köppe (ISBN 978-3-89645-488-1). * Amha, Azeb. "Complex predicates in Zargulla." In ''Wiesbaden explorations in Ethiopian Linguistics: Complex Predicates, finiteness and interrogativity'', pp. 91–119. Harrassowitz Verlag, 2014. * Azeb Amha. 2017. Commands in Wolaitta. In Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. and R. M. W Dixon (eds.) Commands: a cross-linguistic typology, pp. 283 –300. Oxford: Oxford University Press. * Amha, Azeb. "The morphosyntax of negation in Zargulla." ''LOT Occasional Series'' 13 (2009): 199-220. * Amha, Azeb, James Slotta and Hannah S. Sarvasy. 2021. Singing the individual: Name tunes in Oyda and Yopno. Frontiers in Psychology, 12:667599. Doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.667599 * Ameka, Felix and Azeb Amha. 2022. "Research on language and culture in Africa". In: Nico Nassenstein & Svenja Völkel (eds.) Approaches to Language and Culture, pp. 339–383. olume 1 of book series Anthropological Linguistics”Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

References

External links

{{DEFAULTSORT:Amha, Azeb Living people Linguists Linguists from Ethiopia Women linguists Addis Ababa University alumni Leiden University faculty 1967 births