Sheko is an

Omotic The Omotic languages are a group of languages spoken in southwestern Ethiopia, in the Omo River region and southeastern Sudan in Blue Nile State. The Geʽez script is used to write some of the Omotic languages, the Latin script for some others. T ...

language of the

Afro-Asiatic The Afroasiatic languages (also known as Afro-Asiatic, Afrasian, Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic) are a language family (or "phylum") of about 400 languages spoken predominantly in West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of th ...

language family spoken in the area between Tepi and

Mizan Teferi Mizan Teferi (also called Mizan-Aman or simply Mizan) is the largest town in South West Ethiopia Peoples' Region and one of four Capital cities of the region. Mizan is also the administrative centre, of the Bench Maji Zone, Bench Sheko Zone in t ...

in western

Ethiopia Ethiopia, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa region of East Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Ken ...

, 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 () 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 hard palate. They are sometimes referred to as cerebral consona ...

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 A syllabic consonant or vocalic consonant is a consonant that forms the nucleus of a syllable on its own, like the ''m'', ''n'' and ''l'' in some pronunciations of the English words ''rhythm'', ''button'' and ''awful'', respectively. To represe ...

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 Tone is the use of pitch (music), pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or to inflection, inflect words. All oral languages use pitch to express emotional and other para-linguistic informat ...

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 ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensive catalogue of languages. It w ...

'' 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 Database

ELAR archive of Guraferdan Sheko
{{Omotic languages Languages of Ethiopia Tonal languages Dizoid languages