Kafa or Kefa (''Kafi noono'') is a
North Omotic language spoken in
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 ...
at the
Keffa Zone
Keffa or Kaffa, is a zone in the South West Region of Ethiopia. The administrative center is Bonga.
History
The Zone is named after the Kingdom of Kaffa. Kaffa was part of the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' Region (SNNPR) until ...
. It is part of the
Ethiopian Language Area
The Ethiopian language area is a hypothesized linguistic area that was first proposed by Charles A. Ferguson (1970, 1976), who posited a number of phonological and morphosyntactic features that were found widely across Ethiopia and Eritrea, incl ...
, with
SOV word order, ejective consonants, etc.
A collection of proverbs in the language has been published by Mesfin Wodajo.
Within the Kafa culture there is a
caste
Caste is a form of social stratification characterised by endogamy, hereditary transmission of a style of life which often includes an occupation, ritual status in a hierarchy, and customary social interaction and exclusion based on cultura ...
of traditional hunters called the Manja/Manjo 'hunters'. They may once have spoken a different language. However, Leikola has shown that currently they speak Kafa with a number of distinctive words and constructions that they use, reinforcing the distinctions between themselves and the larger Kafa society.
[Leikola, Kirsi. 2014. ''Talking Manjo: Linguistic repertoires as means of negotiating marginalization.'' University of Helsinki: PhD dissertation.]
References
Further reading
* Brockelmann, Carl (1950): Zur Grammatik der Kafa-Sprache. in: Brockelmann, Carl (ed.): ''Abbessinische Berichte über die Verhandlungen der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften''. Leipzig. pp 40–60.
*
Cerulli, Enrico (1951), ''Studi etiopici''. Vol. IV: ''La lingua Caffina''. Roma: Istituto Per L'oriente.
* Fleming, Harold C. (1976), "Kefa (Gonga) Languages", in ''The Non-Semitic Languages of Ethiopia''. Bender, M. L. (ed.)
External links
*
World Atlas of Language Structures
The World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) is a database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials. It was first published by Oxford University Press as a book with CD-ROM i ...
information o
Kefa
Languages of Ethiopia
North Omotic languages
{{AfroAsiatic-lang-stub