Sheko is an Omotic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family spoken in the area between Tepi and Mizan Teferi in western Ethiopia, in the Sheko district in the Bench Maji Zone. The 2007 census lists 38,911 speakers; the 1998 census listed 23,785 speakers, with 13,611 identified as monolinguals.[Raymond G. Gordon Jr., ed. 2005. Ethnologue: Languages of the World. 15th edition. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics.]
Sheko, together with the Dizi language and , is part of a cluster of languages variously called "Maji" or "Dizoid languages".
The language is notable for its retroflex consonants (Aklilu Yilma 1988), a striking feature shared with closely related Dizi language and nearby (but not closely related) Bench language (Breeze 1988).
Phonology
Apart from the above-mentioned retroflex consonants, the phonology of Sheko is characterized by a total 28 consonant phonemes,
[Hellenthal 2010, p. 45] five long vowels and six short vowels,
[Hellenthal 2010, p. 56] plus four phonemic tone levels.
[Hellenthal 2010, p. 111]
Consonants
Hellenthal (2010, p. 45) lists the following consonant phonemes of Sheko:
Unlike other Dizoid languages, Sheko has no contrast between and .[Hellenthal 2010, p. 47] Consonants are rarely geminated,[Hellenthal 2010, p. 47] and there is a syllabic nasal .[Hellenthal 2010, p. 58]
Vowels
Hellenthal (2010, p. 56) lists the following long and short vowels of Sheko: , , , , , , , , , .
Tones
Sheko is one of very few languages in Africa that have four distinct
phonemic tone levels.
[Hellenthal 2010, p. 111] Tone distinguishes meaning both in the lexicon and in the grammar, particularly to distinguish persons in the pronominal system.
[Hellenthal 2010, p. 113]
Grammar
Ethnologue lists the following morphosyntactic features: "SOV; postpositions; genitives, articles, adjectives, numerals, relatives after noun heads; question word initial; 1 prefix, 5 suffixes; word order distinguishes subjects, objects, indirect objects; affixes indicate case of noun phrases; verb affixes mark person, number, gender of subject; passives, causatives, comparatives."
Notes
-
Breeze, Mary. 1988. "Phonological features of Gimira and Dizi." In Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst and Fritz Serzisko (eds.), Cushitic – Omotic: papers from the International Symposium on Cushitic and Omotic languages, Cologne, January 6–9, 1986, 473–487. Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag.
-
Hellenthal, Anneke Christine. 2009. Handout on Sheko subject clitics. download
-
Yilma, Aklilu, Ralph Siebert and Kati Siebert. 2002. "Sociolinguistic survey of the Omotic languages Sheko and Yem." SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2002-053.
External links
