Somali

How the Latin alphabet won out

For centuries Somali was written, when it was written at all, in the Arabic script and in Wadaad's writing, mostly by clerics. The twentieth century added three native alphabets: Osmanya, Borama and Kaddare, invented by Osman Yusuf Kenadid, Abdurahman Sheikh Nuur and Hussein Sheikh Ahmed Kaddare.

The Latin alphabet adopted in 1972 was developed by scholars including Musa Haji Ismail Galal, B. W. Andrzejewski and Shire Jama Ahmed. It has three digraphs, DH, KH and SH. There are no diacritics. Tone is left unwritten. So is the difference between tense and lax vowels, and the apostrophe that stands for the glottal stop never begins a word.

What the state did with Somali after the script

In January 1973 the Supreme Revolutionary Council declared Somali the primary language of administration and education. It became the language of instruction in forms 1 to 4 and, from 1979, in all 12. The Italian daily Stella d'Ottobre was renamed Xiddigta Oktoobar and began publishing in Somali. The same council prohibited borrowing English and Italian terms, part of a push to replace loanwords with Somali coinages.

The constitution names Somali and Arabic as the official languages of Somalia. Since June 2013 the Regional Somali Language Academy, set up in Djibouti City by the governments of Djibouti, Somalia and Ethiopia, has held the mandate to preserve the language.

Why Maay speakers learn Standard Somali

Somali varieties fall into three groups. Northern Somali, spoken from Djibouti through the Somali Region of Ethiopia, is the basis of the standard. Benadir is spoken on the central coast, Mogadishu included, and is fairly intelligible to northern speakers. Maay, spoken by the Digil and Mirifle clans in the south, is only partly intelligible, about as far from Northern Somali as Spanish is from Portuguese. Maay is rarely used in schools or the media, so its speakers pick up Standard Somali as a lingua franca through the mass media and through moving to the cities.

Where the loanwords came from

Arabic supplies an estimated 20% of the vocabulary, used most in religious and administrative speech, and most personal names come from Arabic as well. A count in a 40,000-entry dictionary of 1985 found 1,436 Arabic loanwords, mostly common nouns. Italian gave about 300. Among them is, garawati, 'tie', from cravatta. Persian, Urdu and Hindi left trade words such as khiyaar, 'cucumber'.