Hadiyya language

Hadiyya
Native to Ethiopia
Region Gurage, Hadiya, Kembata regions, area around Hosaena
Native speakers
250,000 (2007 census)[1]
Dialects
Hadiyya
Soro
Leemo
Ethiopic, Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-3 hdy
Glottolog hadi1240[2]

Hadiyya (sometimes Hadiyigna or Adiya) is the Afroasiatic language of the Hadiya people of Ethiopia. Most speakers live in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People's Region in the Hadiya Zone around the town Hosaena.[3][4]

The language is a Highland East Cushitic language. The Libido language, located just to the north in the Mareko district of Gurage Zone, is very similar lexically, but has significant morphological differences. Hadiyya has a set of complex consonant phonemes consisting of a glottal stop and a sonorant: /ʔr/, /ʔj/, /ʔw/, /ʔl/.

The New Testament has been translated in Hadiyya, published by the Bible Society of Ethiopia in 1993. It was originally done using the traditional Ethiopic syllabary. A later printing used the Latin alphabet.

The Ethnologue quotes the 1998 census saying the number of speakers is 923,958, with 595,107 monolinguals. The 2007 census gives the number of speakers as a drastically reduced 253,894.

Notes

  1. Ethiopia 2007 Census
  2. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Hadiyya". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
  3. Raymond G. Gordon, Jr, ed. 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. 15th edition. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
  4. Braukämper, Ulrich and Tilahun Mishago. 1999. Praise and Teasing: Narrative Songs of the Hadiyya in Southern Ethiopia. Frankfurt: Frobenius Institute. Page 116 has a good map of Hadiyya dialects and locations.

References

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