Somali culture: a record kept in speech and written down in 1972

How Somali came to be written in Latin letters

The script was developed by a group of scholars of the language that included Musa Haji Ismail Galal, B. W. Andrzejewski and Shire Jama Ahmed, and the government of Siad Barre formally introduced it in October 1972. Britannica gives the year of adoption as 1973. Djibouti marked the fortieth anniversary of the official script in December 2012, which follows the earlier date, and a photograph from that anniversary identifies Sherif Salaax as president of the Somali language committee of 1972, the body that chose the alphabet.

Ioan Lewis, who wrote the history of Somalia for Britannica, judged that of the military government's crash programmes to transform society "the most successful were mass literacy campaigns in 1973 and 1974", which made Somali a written language in Latin characters for the first time.

Which scripts came before the Latin one

Whether Somali was unwritten before 1972 depends on what is counted. Britannica says that until 1973 it had been an unwritten language. Wikipedia lists two orthographies in use for centuries, the Arabic script and Wadaad's writing, the second associated with Yusuf bin Ahmad al-Kawneyn, a scholar of the thirteenth century. The oldest writing found in Somalia is in Arabic, a funerary inscription in the al-Jami mosque at Barawa dated to the year 498 AH. An inscription from 1365 calls its year a Saturday year, in the Somali calendar that names each year after the weekday on which it begins.

The twentieth century added three scripts invented for Somali itself. Osman Yusuf Kenadid devised Osmanya, Sheikh Abdurahman Sheikh Nuur the Borama script and Hussein Sheikh Ahmed Kaddare the script that carries his name. In the Italian trust territory of the 1950s Somali was an official language beside Italian and was written in Arabic script. The government that took power in 1969 made a sixth choice, the Latin alphabet.

What the literacy campaigns counted

The campaigns were measured more than once and the counts disagree. Wikipedia's article on the Somali Democratic Republic puts literacy at 5% before the campaign and 55% by the mid-1970s, and notes that scholars dispute the starting figure because the surveys were unlikely to count reading learnt through religious education. Its main article on Somalia gives 70% with no year. A former United States ambassador, quoted in the same place, attributed to UNESCO the finding that Somalis "closed down the schools for two years and sent everybody to the field with chalk and blackboards and radio receivers". The Somali ministry of education received a UNESCO prize in 1975.

The BTI 2026 country report says that government surveys in 2022 and 2023 confirmed the UNFPA figure of 40% for 2016.

Why the constitution names two kinds of Somali

Article 5 of the provisional constitution adopted in 2012 makes Somali the official language and names it with a bracket, "Somali (Maay and Maxaa-tiri)", with Arabic as the second language.

Wikipedia sorts the dialects into three groups. Northern Somali is the basis of the standard language. Benaadir, or Coastal Somali, is spoken on the coast from Adale to south of Merca, Mogadishu included, and the coastal dialects carry sounds that Standard Somali does not have. Maay is spoken mainly by the Digil and Mirifle clans, also called the Rahanweyn, in the south, where Britannica places them as farmers and agropastoralists between the Shabeelle and the Jubba.

Arabic is spoken chiefly in the north and in the coastal towns, learnt through religious education, Arabic media and long ties with the Arab world. English and Italian are used at colleges and universities beside Somali, and Italian, the administrative language of the trust territory, is now heard mostly among older people and those who have lived in Italy. Swahili is spoken in the south, Bravanese, a variety of Swahili, on the coast, and Kibajuni by the Bajuni. Article 31 commits the state to promote the cultural practices and local dialects of minorities.

Speech in Somali carries gestures, and most of them are made by women. A quick twist of the open hand means no, or nothing, and a thumb under the chin means fullness. Calling a person with the index finger is impolite, since that is how dogs are called. The military government introduced a new form of address, jaale, which means both the colour yellow and comrade, to work against clannism.

Where the language crosses the border

In December 2012 Djibouti hosted FestSom40 for the script's fortieth anniversary, attended by the presidents of Djibouti, of the Federal Republic of Somalia and of Somaliland, which declared independence in 1991 and whose claim Mogadishu rejects. The conference recommended an academy for the language, the Akademiyada Daryeelka Af-Soomaaliga. Its organiser, the dialectologist Abdirachid Mohamed Ismail, argued that it should be intergovernmental because Somali "is the only language spoken in all the countries of the Horn of Africa", and he wrote that the language was under pressure from Arabic and English in the schools of Somalia and Somaliland.

Why Somalia is called a nation of poets

The phrase is credited to the Canadian novelist Margaret Laurence, who called Somalia a "Nation of Poets" and a "Nation of Bards". She recorded that other Somalis regarded the Eidagale clan as "the recognized experts in the composition of poetry", and she quoted Hersi Jama on what would happen if a hundred Eidagalla men were asked which of them could sing his own gabei: "ninety-five would be able to sing. The others would still be learning."

Poetry and Islam have been described as the twin pillars of Somali culture. The poetry is mainly oral, composed by men and by women, and it takes its metaphors from things that are common in the language. Xeer protects the people who make it. Poets are among the birr magaydo, the groups whose lives the law requires to be spared, with children, women, the pious, messengers, sheikhs and guests. One tradition about the city-states of the ancient coast tells of a King of Barbary whose love for his two daughters, Hoobaal and Heelley, led later generations of composers and poets to put their names at the beginning or the end of their works.

The United Nations' account of the National Theatre's reopening in 2020 quotes the Mogadishu critic Omar Ali Hassan: "The decades of conflict and violence did not deter them from producing music or poems." At FestSom40 the evening sessions were recitations of poetry, broadcast live by Radio and Television of Djibouti.

Who wrote novels once the alphabet existed

With the Latin alphabet adopted in 1972, Wikipedia records, a number of contemporary Somali authors have published novels. Nuruddin Farah's From a Crooked Rib and Links are among the works that earned him the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 1998. Faarax M. J. Cawl wrote Ignorance is the enemy of love, a novel set in the period of the Dervish movement, and the poet Hadraawi gained national renown in the same years.

How a Somali song is made

A song is usually the work of three people, the lyricist or midho, the songwriter or laxan and the singer, codka, meaning the voice. Most Somali songs are pentatonic, using five pitches to the octave where a major scale uses seven. The oud is prominent among the traditional instruments, often with small drums and a reed flute in the background, and qaraami, a genre played on the oud, deals with love. Before the civil war funk, disco, soul and reggae were heard in venues and on the airwaves, according to the UN.

What xeer decides and who keeps it

Xeer is the customary law Somalis have practised for centuries. It is polycentric, which means no single institution or official decides what the law is or how it is to be read. Wikipedia's history of Somalia records the assumption that it developed in the Horn from about the seventh century, and notes that its legal vocabulary is practically free of words borrowed from other languages.

How xeer divides the work of law

The law has named offices. The odayaal are judges, the xeerbogeyaal jurists, the guurtiyaal detectives, the garxajiyaal attorneys, the markhaatiyal witnesses and the waranle the police who enforce a decision. A few tenets are held to be immutable. Blood money, diya, is owed for libel, theft, physical harm, rape and death. Women are to be treated justly, peace emissaries are to be dealt with in good faith, and the birr magaydo are to be spared. Dowry is paid and eloping is sanctioned. There are rules for the use of pasture, water and other resources, for the support of married female relatives and newlyweds, and for gifts of livestock and other assets to the poor.

Somalia's first entry on UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage was a form of this law. Xeer Ciise, inscribed in 2024, is listed as the oral customary laws of the Somali-Issa communities in Ethiopia, Djibouti and Somalia.

How a lineage is recited

Abtirsi is the list of a person's paternal ancestors, recited from the father to the grandfather and great-grandfather and on to the patriarch of the clan family from which the person descends. Wikipedia names five patrilineal clan families, the Hawiye, Darod, Rahanweyn, Dir and Isaaq.

Marriage extends alliance across those lines. A study of 1954 found that of 89 marriages contracted by men of the Dhulbahante clan, 55 were with women of other Dhulbahante sub-clans and 30 with women of clans belonging to other clan families. Descent also divides. Britannica records a strict social distinction between Somali of nomadic descent and the Bantu, many of them descendants of enslaved people, who farm the irrigated land on the Jubba and Shabeelle. The BTI 2026 report says members of most minority groups, the Somali Jareer and the occupational caste groups above all, are treated as second-class citizens.

The military government legislated against the whole system. Lewis writes that it outlawed clan loyalties, made clan-inspired behaviour a criminal offence and renamed the clan elders "peace-seekers". Clan now organises the lower house of the federal parliament, whose indirect elections run on the "4.5 formula", in which members are chosen within their own clans and sub-clans. A poll of 1,633 people across the Benadir region published in 2014 found 72% dissatisfied with clan-based representation and the 4.5 system.

What replaced the courts after the collapse

In most areas the secular law of the state stopped working with the collapse of the government in 1991, according to BTI, and two existing systems took its place, xeer and sharia, the second growing in influence. Secular courts sit only in the larger cities, and the two systems are applied in varying combinations across the country.

How Islam is taught and practised in Somalia

Virtually all Somalis are Sunni Muslims of the Shafi'i school, in Britannica's description. Article 2 of the constitution makes Islam the religion of the state, bars the propagation of any other religion and forbids any law that does not comply with the general principles of sharia.

Religious life is organised through three Sufi orders, the tariqa. The Qadiriyya, named after Shaikh Abdul Qadir Gilani of Baghdad, is the less strict and the order to which most Somalis belong. The Ahmadiyya and its offshoot the Salihiyya preached a puritanical Islam and rejected tawassul, the practice of visiting the tombs of saints to ask for their mediation, and the difference between Salihis and Qadiris over that practice was controversial. Women were at first excluded from the male orders, and in the late nineteenth century they formed an institution of their own, Abay Siti, joining Somali tradition with Islam.

Instruction begins in the dugsi, the Qur'anic school, which teaches in Arabic. UNICEF describes it as enjoying strong support from parents and as often the only school available to nomadic families. A study from 1993 found that around 40% of Qur'anic school pupils were girls, where primary schools showed a wide gap between boys and girls, and that the teachers had little or no qualification. The Ministry of Endowment and Islamic Affairs now regulates the schools, and Article 30 of the constitution makes the teaching of Islam compulsory in public and private schools, exempting schools owned by non-Muslims.

Celebrations take the form of religious festivals, Eid al-Fitr at the end of the fasting month and Eid al-Adha among them, when families dress up to visit one another and money is given to the poor. In Somaliland, 18 May marks the declaration of independence of 1991, which Mogadishu rejects, and 26 June the independence of British Somaliland in 1960.

Why Somali art leaves out the human figure

Somali art is aniconic, which Wikipedia attributes partly to the lingering influence of pre-Islamic Somali mythology and partly to Islam. Living creatures appear only rarely, in the golden birds on the canopies of Mogadishu, the camels and horses of the rock paintings in the north and the plant decoration on religious tombs in the south. Beyond those, the norm is intricate pattern, geometric design and bold colour.

What is decorated and what is built

Possessions in a nomadic household are moved often, and Wikipedia's article on Somaliland observes that this leaves "little reason for the plastic arts to be highly developed". The decoration goes onto what is carried. Woven and wooden milk jugs, haamo, are embellished, the most decorative of them made in Ceerigaabo, and so are wooden headrests. Henna is the women's art, applied to the hands, arms, feet and neck for weddings, Eid and Ramadan, often in flower motifs and triangles, with a dot in the palm and the fingertips dipped in the dye. A henna party is held before the wedding.

Monumental building belongs to the same norm. Pyramidal burial structures of dry stone, taalo, survive in their hundreds across the country, and walls such as the Wargaade Wall enclose old settlements. Islam moved building from dry stone to coral stone, sun-dried brick and limestone, and many mosques were raised on the ruins of older structures, a practice that continued for centuries.

What is worn for weddings and Eid

For daily wear women tie the guntiino, a long cloth knotted over the shoulder and draped round the waist, traditionally plain white with decorative borders and now more often cut from alindi. For weddings and Eid they wear the dirac, a long, light voile dress of cotton or polyester, usually bright and often with gilded borders or threads, over a silk underskirt, the gorgorad, usually bought together with it at Somali clothing stores. Married women wear the headscarf called shash. Gold and silver bangles are the long tradition, and a bride is often dressed in gold.

Men wear the macawis, a sarong-like cloth round the waist, with a large cloth over the upper body and a turban or the embroidered koofiyad cap, or else the long white khamiis. In 2025 UNESCO inscribed Somalia's second element of intangible heritage, the zaffa in the traditional wedding.

What goes into a Somali meal

Trade brought Arab, Indian and Italian flavours into Somali cooking, and its staples are rice and pasta with lamb, beef and chicken, seasoned with cumin, cardamom and coriander. The rice served at lunch or dinner is mixed with meat, vegetables and raisins, and parts of it are often tinted yellow or orange with saffron so that the dish reaches the table in several colours. Pasta and lasagne spread under Italian rule, especially in the south. Canjeero, also called lahooh, a fermented flatbread like a pancake, is eaten in Somalia as it is in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Yemen. Camel meat and camel milk are counted as delicacies.

Coffee, qahwo, and tea, shah, are both prepared with chosen spices. Xalwo, a smooth jelly-like sweet of spices, seeds, nuts and caramelised sugar, close to the Omani halwa, is served with the coffee. After a meal the house is perfumed with frankincense or incense, unsi, burnt in a dabqaad, the Somali incense burner.

How the theatre and the museum reopened together

Chinese engineers built the National Theatre in Mogadishu in 1967 as a gift from Mao Zedong, and it opened that year. It closed in 1991 at the start of the civil war, served as a base for warlords fighting over the city, and was left close to ruin. When government forces and African Union troops drove al-Shabaab out of the centre of the capital in 2012 it was repaired and reopened, and al-Shabaab destroyed it with a suicide bombing fifteen days later. It opened again on 1 July 2020, the anniversary of independence, after a year and a half of rebuilding under a national volunteering initiative, Isxilqaan, with money contributed by many Somalis. Its main hall seated 1,270 people in August 2020.

The National Museum opened in 1933 and closed in 1991. It reopened on the same day as the theatre, 1 July 2020, the sixtieth anniversary of independence, after rebuilding that the federal government financed from 2019.

Somalia ratified the World Heritage Convention and the convention on intangible heritage on 23 July 2020. No Somali property was on the World Heritage List in 2026. The tentative list then held three sites, Bushbushle National Park and the Hobyo grass and shrubland, both added in 2024, and the Mogadishu Secondo-Lido Lighthouse, added in 2025.