Dahalik language

Dahalik (ዳሃሊክ)
Dahaalik, Dahalik, Dahlak
Native to	Eritrea
Region	Dahlak Archipelago
Native speakers	2,500 (2012)[1]
Language family	Afro-Asiatic Semitic South Semitic Ethiopic North Ethiopic Dahalik (ዳሃሊክ)
Language codes
ISO 639-3	dlk
Glottolog	daha1247[2]

Dahalik (ዳሃሊክ [haka (na)] dahālík, "[language (of)] the people of Dahlak";^[3] also Dahaalik, Dahlik, Dahlak) is an Afro-Asiatic language spoken exclusively in Eritrea. Its speech area is off the coast of Massawa, on three islands in the Dahlak Archipelago: Dahlak Kebir, Nora and Dehil. It has around 2,500 to 3,000 speakers.

Dahalik belongs to the Afro-Asiatic family's Semitic branch, and is closely related to Tigre and Tigrinya. It is said to be not mutually intelligible with Tigre (see Shaebia below), and, according to Simeone-Senelle,^[4] is sufficiently different to be considered a separate language. However, there are those who disagree.^[5]

References

1. Dahalik (ዳሃሊክ) at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015)
2. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Dahalik". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
3. Marie-Claude Simeone-Senelle: Dahālík, a newly discovered Afro-Semitic language spoken exclusively in Eritrea (PDF), in: shaebia.org, 2005
4. • Simeone-Senelle, Marie-Claude. 2000. 'Situation linguistique dans le sud de l'Erythrée', in Wolff/Gensler (eds) Proceedings of the 2nd World Congress of African Linguistics, 1997, Köln: Köppe, p. 261–276.
5. Idris, S. M. 2012. Dahalik: An Endangered Language or a Tigre Variety? Journal of Eritrean Studies 6 (1): 51–74.

External links

• Shaebia: Dahalik, a newly discovered Afro-Semitic language spoken exclusively in Eritrea PDF (122 KiB)
• Shaebia: Dahalik – Mysterious Tongue of the Dahlak Islands