Yemsa is the language of the
Yem people of the former Kingdom of
Yamma, known as
Kingdom of Janjero
The Kingdom of Yamma was a small kingdom located in what is now Ethiopia. It lay in the angle formed by the Omo and the Jimma Gibe Rivers; to the west lay the Kingdom of Jimma and to the south the Kingdom of Garo. Three mountains — Mount Bor ...
to the
Amhara. It is a member of the
Omotic group of languages, most closely related to
Kafa. It is distinctive in having different systems of vocabulary depending on social status, rather like
Japanese
Japanese may refer to:
* Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia
* Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan
* Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture
** Japanese diaspor ...
and
Javanese. The estimated number of speakers varies wildly from about 1000 (Bender, 1976) to half a million (Aklilu, 1993).
Yemsa is the main language spoken in
Yem special woreda
Yem is one of the woredas in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' Region (SNNPR) of Ethiopia. Because Yem is not part of any Zone in the SNNPR, it is considered a Special woreda, an administrative subdivision which is similar to an ...
,
SNNPR.
The Fuga dialect is distinct enough to perhaps be a different language.
Sample verb forms
* - I do
* - we do
* - you (singular) do
* - he does
* - she does
[''African Languages: An Introduction'', edited by Bernd Heine & Derek Nurse, Cambridge University Press, 2000.]
Notes
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-RO ...
information o
YemsaYemsa basic lexicon at the Global Lexicostatistical Database
North Omotic languages
Languages of Ethiopia
{{AfroAsiatic-lang-stub