This article describes the

phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

of the

Oromo language Oromo ( or ; Oromo: ''Afaan Oromoo''), in the linguistic literature of the early 20th century also called Galla (a name with a pejorative meaning and therefore rejected by the Oromo people), is an Afroasiatic language that belongs to the Cushiti ...

Consonants

The Oromo language has 24 to 28 consonant phonemes depending on the dialect. is a

voiced retroflex plosive The voiced retroflex plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is , and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is d`. Like all the retroflex ...

. It may have an implosive quality for some speakers. The voiceless stops and are always aspirated. and are dental The velar fricative is mainly used in the eastern dialect (Harar) as a phoneme. It is represented as in the Oromo script (''Qubee'') though it is pronounced as a in most other dialects.

Vowels

Oromo has five vowels which all contrast long and short vowels. Sometimes there is a change in vowel quality when the vowel is short. Short vowels tend to be more centralized than their counterparts. Though sometimes diphthongs may occur, there are none that occur in a word's unaltered form.

Tone

When needed, the conventions for marking tone in written Oromo are as follows: *

acute accent The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed ch ...

- high tone *

grave accent The grave accent () ( or ) is a diacritical mark used to varying degrees in French, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian and many other western European languages, as well as for a few unusual uses in English. It is also used in other languages using t ...

- low tone *

circumflex The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from la, circumflexus "bent around"a ...

- falling tone Tones on long vowels are marked on the first vowel symbol. In Oromo, the tone-bearing unit is the

mora Mora may refer to: People * Mora (surname) Places Sweden * Mora, Säter, Sweden * Mora, Sweden, the seat of Mora Municipality * Mora Municipality, Sweden United States * Mora, Louisiana, an unincorporated community * Mora, Minnesota, a city * M ...

rather than the vowel of the syllable. A long vowel or a diphthong consists of two morae and can bear two tones. Each mora is defined as being of high or low tone. Only one high tone occurs per word and this must be on the final or penultimate mora. Particles do not have a high tone. (These include prepositions, clitic pronouns for subject and object, impersonal subject pronouns and focus markers.) There are therefore three possible "accentual patterns" in word roots. Phonetically there are three tones: high, low and falling. Rules: # On a long vowel, a sequence of high-low is realized as a falling tone. # On a long vowel, a sequence of low-high is realized as high-high. (Occasionally it is a rising tone.) This use of tone may be characterized as

pitch accent A pitch-accent language, when spoken, has word accents in which one syllable in a word or morpheme is more prominent than the others, but the accentuated syllable is indicated by a contrasting pitch ( linguistic tone) rather than by loudness ( ...

. It is similar to that in Somali. Stress is connected with tone. The high tone has strong stress; the falling tone has less stress and the low tone has no stress.

Phonological processes

Allophones

* becomes between two vowels. * becomes between two vowels. * is pronounced as a

voiceless velar fricative The voiceless velar fricative is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It was part of the consonant inventory of Old English and can still be found in some dialects of English, most notably in Scottish English, e.g. in ''loc ...

before and . * The and (i.e. the Arabic Kha) are used interchangeably in the Borana dialect. * In the

Goma Goma is the capital of North Kivu province in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is located on the northern shore of Lake Kivu, next to the Rwandan city of Gisenyi. The lake and the two cities are in the Albertine Rift, the weste ...

dialect, vowels are nasalized before and ,

Epenthesis

When a vowel occurs in word-initial position, a glottal stop () is inserted before it.

Elision

* is dropped before . * are dropped before .

Sandhi

Phonological changes occur at morpheme boundaries (

sandhi Sandhi ( sa, सन्धि ' , "joining") is a cover term for a wide variety of sound changes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. Examples include fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of one sound depending on near ...

) for specific grammatical morphemes. There may be assimilation. * The cluster becomes a

geminated In phonetics and phonology, gemination (), or consonant lengthening (from Latin 'doubling', itself from ''gemini'' 'twins'), is an articulation of a consonant for a longer period of time than that of a singleton consonant. It is distinct from s ...

. * becomes * assimilates into the proceeding , and . * becomes between vowels

References

Works cited

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Oromo Phonology Oromo language Afroasiatic phonologies