Somali language
Somali is an Afroasiatic language belonging to the Cushitic branch. Somali is spoken primarily in Greater Somalia, and the Somali diaspora as a mother tongue. It is an official language in Somalia and Ethiopia, and serves as a national language in Djibouti. It is also a recognised minority language in Kenya. The language is officially written with the Latin alphabet, although the Arabic script and several Somali scripts like Osmanya, Kaddare and the Borama script are informally used.
Classification
Somali is classified within the Cushitic branch of the Afroasiatic family, specifically, Lowland East Cushitic in addition to Afar and Saho. Somali is the best-documented of the Cushitic languages, with academic studies of the language dating back to the late 19th century.Geographic distribution of Somali
The Somali language is spoken in Somali inhabited areas of Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Yemen and by members of the Somali diaspora. It is also spoken as an adoptive language by a few ethnic minority groups and individuals in Somali majority regions.Somali is the most widely spoken Cushitic language in the region followed by Oromo and Afar.
As of 2021, there are approximately 24 million speakers of Somali, spread in Greater Somalia of which around 17 million reside in Somalia. The language is spoken by an estimated 95% of the country's inhabitants, and also by a majority of the population in Djibouti.
Following the start of the Somali Civil War in the early 1990s, the Somali-speaking diaspora increased in size, with newer Somali speech communities forming in parts of the Middle East, North America and Europe.
Official status
Constitutionally, Somali and Arabic are the two official languages of Somalia. Somali has been an official national language since January 1973, when the Supreme Revolutionary Council declared it the Somali Democratic Republic's primary language of administration and education. Somali was thereafter established as the main language of academic instruction in forms 1 through 4, following preparatory work by the government-appointed Somali Language Committee. It later expanded to include all 12 forms in 1979. In 1972, the SRC adopted a Latin orthography as the official national alphabet over several other writing scripts that were then in use. Concurrently, the Italian-language daily newspaper Stella d'Ottobre was nationalized, renamed to Xiddigta Oktoobar, and began publishing in Somali. The state-run Radio Mogadishu has also broadcast in Somali since 1951. Additionally, other regional public networks like Somaliland National TV and Puntland TV and Radio and, as well as Eastern Television Network and Horn Cable Television, among other private broadcasters, air programs in Somali.Somali is recognized as an official working language in the Somali Region of Ethiopia. Although it is not an official language of Djibouti, it constitutes a major national language there. Somali is used in television and radio broadcasts, with the government-operated Radio Djibouti transmitting programs in the language from 1943 onwards.
The Kenya Broadcasting Corporation also broadcasts in the Somali language in its Iftin FM Programmes. The language is spoken in the Somali territories within North Eastern Kenya, namely Wajir County, Garissa County and Mandera County.
The Somali language is regulated by the Regional Somali Language Academy, an intergovernmental institution established in June 2013 in Djibouti City by the governments of Djibouti, Somalia and Ethiopia. It is officially mandated with preserving the Somali language.
As of 2025, Somali, Afar and Oromo are the only 3 Cushitic languages available on Google Translate.
Varieties
The Somali languages are broadly divided into three main groups: Northern Somali, Benadir and Maay. Northern Somali forms the basis for Standard Somali. It is spoken by the majority of the Somali population with its speech area stretching from Djibouti, and the Somali Region of Ethiopia to the Northern Frontier District. This widespread modern distribution is a result of a long series of southward population movements over the past ten centuries from the Gulf of Aden littoral. Lamberti subdivides Northern Somali into three dialects: Northern Somali proper, the Darod group, and the Lower Juba group. The sub dialect of Northern Somali that the Isaaq speak has the highest prestige of any other Somali dialect.Benadir is spoken on the central Indian Ocean seaboard, including Mogadishu. It forms a relatively smaller group. The dialect is fairly mutually intelligible with Northern Somali.
Maay is principally spoken by the Digil and Mirifle clans in the southern regions of Somalia. Its speech area extends from the southwestern border with Ethiopia to a region close to the coastal strip between Mogadishu and Kismayo, including the city of Baidoa. Maay is partially mutually comprehensible with Northern Somali, with the degree of divergence comparable to that between Spanish and Portuguese. Despite these linguistic differences, Somali speakers collectively view themselves as speaking a common language. It is also not generally used in education or media. However, Maay speakers often use Standard Somali as a lingua franca, which is learned via mass communications, internal migration and urbanization.
Phonology
Vowels
Somali has five vowel articulations that all contrast murmured and harsh voice as well as vowel length. There is little change in vowel quality when the vowel is lengthened. Each vowel has a harmonic counterpart, and every vowel within a harmonic group must harmonize with the other vowels. The Somali orthography, however, does not distinguish between the two harmonic variants of each vowel.Different analyses have proposed somewhat different vowel inventories and features for Somali, depending on the set of speakers whose dialects are studied. Up to four features may be phonologically distinctive: height, backness, tongue root, and length.
Saeed and Orwin both propose systems with five core vowels, but only Orwin's system makes a tongue root distinction. Gabbard proposes a system with six core vowels, with a tongue root distinction, but only on front vowels.
| Front | Central | Back | |
| High | |||
| Mid | |||
| Low |
Orwin argues that, in addition to the vowels listed above, each of these five vowels has a fronted variant, based on the existence of minimal pairs such as:
- duul vs. du̘u̘l
- keen vs. ke̘e̘n
Consonants
Somali has 22 consonant phonemes.The retroflex plosive may have an implosive quality for some Somali Bantu speakers, and intervocalically it can be realized as the flap. Some speakers produce with epiglottal trilling as // in retrospect. is often epiglottalized.
The letter is pronounced as a retroflex flap when it occurs intervocalically, as in qudhaanjo.
The letter, found in Arabic loanwords, is rarely pronounced as a velar fricative. It is more often conflated with, which is pronounced in syllabic coda position.
Tone
Pitch is phonemic in Somali, but it is debated whether Somali is a pitch accent, or it is a tonal language. Andrzejewski posits that Somali is a tonal language, whereas Banti suggests that it is a pitch system.Phonotactics
The syllable structure of Somali is V.Root morphemes usually have a mono- or di-syllabic structure.
Clusters of two consonants do not occur word-initially or word-finally, i.e., they only occur at syllable boundaries. The following consonants can be geminate: /b/, /d/, /ɖ/, /ɡ/, /ɢ/, /m/, /n/, /r/ and /l/. The following cannot be geminate: /t/, /k/ and the fricatives.
Two vowels cannot occur together at syllable boundaries. Epenthetic consonants, e.g. and , are therefore inserted.
Grammar
Morphology
Somali is an agglutinative language, and also shows properties of inflection. Affixes mark many grammatical meanings, including aspect, tense and case.Somali has an old prefixal verbal inflection restricted to four common verbs, with all other verbs undergoing inflection by more obvious suffixation. This general pattern is similar to the stem alternation that typifies Cairene Arabic.
Somali has two sets of pronouns: independent pronouns and clitic pronouns. The independent pronouns behave grammatically as nouns, and normally occur with the suffixed article -ka/-ta. This article may be omitted after a conjunction or focus word. For example, adna meaning "and you...". Clitic pronouns are attached to the verb and do not take nominal morphology. Somali marks clusivity in the first person plural pronouns; this is also found in a number of other East Cushitic languages, such as Rendille and Dhaasanac.
As in various other Afro-Asiatic languages, Somali is characterized by polarity of gender, whereby plural nouns usually take the opposite gender agreement of their singular forms. For example, the plural of the masculine noun dibi is formed by converting it into feminine dibi. Somali is unusual among the world's languages in that the object is unmarked for case while the subject is marked, though this feature is found in other Cushitic languages such as Oromo.
Syntax
Somali is a subject–object–verb language. It is largely head final, with postpositions and with obliques preceding verbs. These are common features of the Cushitic and Semitic Afroasiatic languages spoken in the Horn region. However, Somali noun phrases are head-initial, whereby the noun precedes its modifying adjective. This pattern of general head-finality with head-initial noun phrases is also found in other Cushitic languages, but not generally in Ethiopian Semitic languages.Somali uses three focus markers: baa, ayaa and waxa, which generally mark new information or contrastive emphasis. Baa and ayaa require the focused element to occur preverbally, while waxa may be used following the verb.