Sheko is an
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 ...
language of the
Afro-Asiatic
The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic), also known as Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic, and sometimes also as Afrasian, Erythraean or Lisramic, are a language family of about 300 languages that are spoken predominantly in the geographic ...
language family spoken in the area between
Tepi and
Mizan Teferi in western
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 Er ...
, in the
Sheko district in the
Bench Maji Zone. The 2007 census lists 38,911 speakers; the 1998 census listed 23,785 speakers, with 13,611 identified as monolinguals.
Sheko, together with the
Dizi and
Nayi languages, is part of a cluster of languages variously called "Maji" or "
Dizoid".
The language is notable for its
retroflex consonant
A retroflex ( /ˈɹɛtʃɹoːflɛks/), apico-domal ( /əpɪkoːˈdɔmɪnəl/), or cacuminal () consonant is a coronal consonant where the tongue has a flat, concave, or even curled shape, and is articulated between the alveolar ridge and the ...
s (Aklilu Yilma 1988), a striking feature shared with closely related
Dizi and nearby (but not closely related)
Bench (Breeze 1988).
Phonology
Apart from the above-mentioned retroflex consonants, the phonology of Sheko is characterized by a total 28 consonant phonemes, five long vowels and six short vowels, plus four phonemic tone levels.
Consonants
Hellenthal (2010, p. 45) lists the following consonant phonemes of Sheko:
Unlike other Dizoid languages, Sheko has no contrast between and . Consonants are rarely geminated, and there is a
syllabic nasal
Vowels
Hellenthal (2010, p. 56) lists the following long and short vowels of Sheko: , , , , , , , , , .
Tones
Sheko is one of very few languages in Africa that have four distinct
phonemic tone levels. Tone distinguishes meaning both in the lexicon and in the grammar, particularly to distinguish persons in the pronominal system.
[Hellenthal 2010, p. 113]
Grammar
''
Ethnologue'' lists the following morphosyntactic features: "SOV; postpositions; genitives, articles, adjectives, numerals, relatives after noun heads; question word initial; 1 prefix, 5 suffixes; word order distinguishes subjects, objects, indirect objects; affixes indicate case of noun phrases; verb affixes mark person, number, gender of subject; passives, causatives, comparatives."
Notes
References
* Breeze, Mary. 1988. "Phonological features of Gimira and Dizi." In Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst and Fritz Serzisko (eds.), Cushitic – Omotic: papers from the International Symposium on Cushitic and Omotic languages, Cologne, January 6–9, 1986, 473–487. Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag.
* Hellenthal, Anneke Christine. 2009. Handout on Sheko subject clitics
download*
*
* Yilma, Aklilu, Ralph Siebert and Kati Siebert. 2002
"Sociolinguistic survey of the Omotic languages Sheko and Yem." SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2002-053.
External links
Sheko basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical DatabaseELAR archive of Guraferdan Sheko
{{Omotic languages
Languages of Ethiopia
Tonal languages
Dizoid languages