Dizin (often called “Dizi” or “Maji” in the literature) is an
Omotic language
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 ...
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 s ...
language family spoken by the
Dizi people
Dizi (also known as the Maji) is the name of an ethnic group living in southern Ethiopia. They share a number of somatic similarities with certain culturally (but not always linguistically) related peoples of south-western Ethiopia, which include ...
, primarily in the
Maji woreda
Districts of Ethiopia, also called woredas ( am, ወረዳ; ''woreda''), are the third level of the administrative divisions of Ethiopia – after ''zones'' and the '' regional states''.
These districts are further subdivided into a number of ...
of the
, located in southwestern
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 ...
. The 2007 census listed 33,927 speakers.
A population of 17,583 was identified as monolinguals in 1994.
[Raymond G. Gordon Jr., ed. 2005. ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World''. 15th edition. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics.]
The language has basic
SOV (subject–object–verb) word order, tones, and is largely suffixing. Phonologically, "Features of the Dizin sound system include
glottalized consonants,
syllabic nasal
A syllabic consonant or vocalic consonant is a consonant that forms a syllable on its own, like the ''m'', ''n'' and ''l'' in some pronunciations of the English words ''rhythm'', ''button'' and ''bottle''. To represent it, the understroke diacrit ...
s,
lengthened vowel
In linguistics, vowel length is the perceived length of a vowel sound: the corresponding physical measurement is duration. In some languages vowel length is an important phonemic factor, meaning vowel length can change the meaning of the word, ...
s, three
phonemic tone
Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information and to convey emph ...
levels and
contour tone
A tone contour, or contour tone, is a tone in a tonal language which shifts from one pitch to another over the course of the syllable or word. Tone contours are especially common in East, Southeast Asia, West Africa, Nilo-Saharan languages, K ...
s. Western Dizin has phonemic retroflex consonants. The glottal stop is analyzed as phonemic word initially before nasals, but not phonemic elsewhere". (Beachy 2005:iv)
Dizin, together with the
Sheko and
Nayi languages, is part of a cluster of languages variously called "Maji" or "Dizoid".
Notes
References
* Allan, Edward. 1976. Dizi. In ''The Non-Semitic Languages of Ethiopia'', M. Lionel Bender, ed., pp. 377–392. East Lansing, Michigan: African Studies Center, Michigan State University.
Beachy, Marvin Dean. 2005. An overview of Central Dizin phonology and morphology. M.A. thesis, University of Texas at Arlington.* 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.
* Muldrow, William. 1976. Languages of the Maji area. In ''Language in Ethiopia'', ed. by Bender, Bowen, Cooper, and Ferguson, pp. 603–607. Oxford University Press.
*
* Savá, Graziano and Mauro Tosco. ''An Annotated Edition of Father G. Toselli’s Dizi Grammar.'' (Cushitic and Omotic Studies, 5.) Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2016); viii,185 pp., 3 maps, 128illus., 9 tables, graphs.
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-R ...
information o
DiziDizi basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
Languages of Ethiopia
Dizoid languages
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