Dime or Dima is an
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 s ...
language spoken in the northern part of the
Selamago
Selamago is a woreda in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' Region of Ethiopia. Part of the Debub Omo Zone, Selamago is bordered on the south by Nyangatom, on the west and north by the Omo River which separates it from the Bench Maj ...
district in the
of
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 ...
, around
Mount Smith
Mount Smith () is a mountain over 1,400 m, standing north of Mawson Glacier and 7 miles (11 km) north-northwest of Mount Murray in the Prince Albert Mountains in Victoria Land, Antarctica. Discovered by the Discovery Expedition
...
.
[ Dime divides into at least two dialects, which include Us'a and Gerfa. It has six case suffixes in addition to an unmarked nominative. It is overwhelmingly suffixing, but uses prefixes for demonstratives and reduplication. Phonologically, it is noteworthy among the ]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 co ...
for having velar and uvular fricative phonemes.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, inc ...
.
The language, as well as the Dime people
Dime or Dimes may refer to:
Coins
* Dime (United States coin)
* Dime (Canadian coin)
Acronyms (DIME)
* Dark Internet Mail Environment
* Dense inert metal explosive
* Detroit Institute of Music Education
** DIME Denver, a branch of the Detroi ...
themselves, reportedly decreased in numbers over the 20th century due to predation from their neighbors the Bodi, and both are in danger of extinction. According to Ethiopian census figures, the 1994 census reported 6293 speakers of the Dime language in the alone;''1994 Population and Housing Census of Ethiopia: Results for Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples' Region'', Vol. 1, part 1
Table 2.14 in the 2007 census, only 574 speakers were reported for all of Ethiopia.
Further, because the Dime language still lacks a writing system and there are no local schools to promote the use of the language, it is even more threatened.
[
]
References
External links
* Yilma, Aklilu and Ralph Siebert (2002)
"Sociolinguistic survey report of the Chara, Dime, Melo and Nayi languages of Ethiopia part 1."
SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2002-029.
* Ralph Siebert (2002)
"Sociolinguistic survey report on the Dime language of Ethiopia."
SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2002-043
* 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-R ...
information o
Dime
{{Omotic languages
Languages of Ethiopia
Aroid languages