Kambaata language

Kambaata
Native to Ethiopia
Region southwest Gurage, Kambaata, Hadiyya Regions
Native speakers
890,000 (2007 census)[1]
Dialects
Kambaata
Ṭəmbaro
Ethiopic, Latin
Language codes
ISO 639-3 Either:
ktb
alw
Glottolog kamb1318[2]

Kambaata is a Highland East Cushitic language, part of the larger Afro-Asiatic family and spoken by the Kambaata people. Dialects are Kambaata, Tambaro, Alaba, and K'abeena. It is one of the official languages of Ethiopia. The language has a large number of verbal affixes. When these are affixed to verbal roots, there are a large amount of morphophonemic changes.[3] The language has SOV order (subject–object–verb). The phonemes of Kambaata include five vowels (which are distinctively long or short), a set of ejectives, a retroflexed implosive, and glottal stop.

The New Testament and some parts of the Old Testament have been translated into the Kambaata language. At first, they were published in the Ethiopian syllabary (New Testament in 1992), but later on, they were republished in Latin letters, in conformity with new policies and practices.

Notes

  1. Ethiopia 2007 Census
  2. Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Kambaataic". Glottolog. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
  3. Sim 1985, 1988.

References

External links


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