Afar is an Afroasiatic language belonging to the Cushitic branch, primarily spoken by the Afar people, native to parts of Djibouti, Eritrea and Ethiopia. It is an official language in Ethiopia; and a national language in Djibouti and Eritrea. Afar is officially written in the Latin script and has over 2.6 million speakers.
According to Ethnologue, there are total Afar speakers. Of these, 1,280,000 were recorded in the 2007 Ethiopian census, with 906,000 monolinguals registered in the 1994 census.
In Eritrea, Afar is recognized as one of nine national languages which formally enjoy equal status although Tigrinya and Arabic are by far of greatest significance in official usage. There are daily broadcasts on the national radio and a translated version of the Eritrean constitution. In education, however, Afar speakers prefer Arabic – which many of them speak as a second language – as the language of instruction.
In the Afar Region of Ethiopia, Afar is also recognized as an official working language.
Since 2020, Afar is one of the five official working languages of Ethiopia.
Voiceless stop consonants which close syllables are released, e.g., .
Sentence final vowels of affirmative verbs are aspirated (and stressed), e.g.
In the early 1970s, two Afar intellectuals and nationalists, Dimis and Redo, formalized the Afar alphabet. Known as Qafar Feera, the orthography is based on the Latin script.
Officials from the Institut des Langues de Djibouti, the Eritrean Ministry of Education, and the Ethiopian Afar Language Studies and Enrichment Center have since worked with Afar linguists, authors and community representatives to select a standard orthography for Afar from among the various existing writing systems used to transcribe the language.
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