Wolaytta is an Omotic

Omotic languages

The Omotic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic family spoken in southwestern Ethiopia. The Ge'ez alphabet is used to write some Omotic languages, the Roman alphabet for some others. They are fairly agglutinative, and have complex tonal systems .-Language list:The North and South Omotic...

 language spoken in the Wolaita Zone and some parts of the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People's Region

Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People's Region

Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People's Region is one of the nine ethnic divisions of Ethiopia. It was formed from the merger of the former Regions 7-11 following the 1994 elections...

 of Ethiopia

Ethiopia

Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...

. The number of speakers of this language is estimated at 2,000,000 (1991 UBS); it is the native language of the Welayta people

Welayta people

Wolayta is the name of an ethnic group and its former kingdom, located in southern Ethiopia. According to the most recent census , they number 1.7 million people or 2.31 percent of the country's population, of whom 289,707 are urban inhabitants...

. The estimates of the population vary greatly because it is not agreed where the boundaries of the language are.

There are conflicting claims about how widely Wolaytta is spoken. The Ethnologue identifies one smaller dialect region: Zala. Some hold that Melo

Melo language

Melo is an Afro-Asiatic language spoken in the Gamo Gofa Zone of the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People's Region in Ethiopia....

, Oyda

Oyda language

Oyda is an Afro-Asiatic language spoken in the Gamo Gofa Zone of Ethiopia.The 2007 Census of Ethiopia lists 45,120 individuals for the ethnic group.- External links :* , LL-Map website...

, and Gamo-Gofa-Dawro

Gamo-Gofa-Dawro language

Gamo-Gofa-Dawro is an Afro-Asiatic language spoken in the Dawro, Gamo Gofa and Wolayita Zones of the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People's Region in Ethiopia. Dialects include Gamo, Gofa, Dawro. Subdialects of Dawro are Konta and Kucha...

 are also dialects, but most authorities, including Ethnologue and ISO 639-3 now list these as separate languages. The different communities of speakers also recognize them as separate languages.

Wolaytta has existed in written form since the 1940s, when the Sudan Interior Mission first devised a system for writing it. The writing system was later revised by a team led by Dr. Bruce Adams. They finished the New Testament in 1981 and the entire Bible in 2002. It was one of the first languages the Derg

Derg

The Derg or Dergue was a Communist military junta that came to power in Ethiopia following the ousting of Haile Selassie I. Derg, which means "committee" or "council" in Ge'ez, is the short name of the Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces, Police, and Territorial Army, a committee of...

 selected for their literacy campaign (1979–1991), before any other southern languages. Welaytta pride in their written language led to a fiercely hostile response in 1998 when the Ethiopian government distributed textbooks written in Wegagoda – an artificial language based on amalgamating Wolaytta with several closely related languages. As a result the textbooks in Wegagoda were withdrawn and teachers returned to ones in Wolaytta.

Lexical similarity with

• Gamo 79% to 93%
• Gofa 84%
• Kullo 80%
• Korze 80%
• Koorete
  Koorete language
  Koorete is the language spoken by the Koore people of southern Ethiopia.-Bibliography:*Hayward, R. 1982. "Notes on the Koyra Language". Afrika und Übersee 65: pp. 211–268....
  
   48%
• Male
  Male language (Ethiopia)
  Male , is an Omotic language spoken in the Omo Region of Ethiopia by the Male people. It is called in ISO 639-3 to distinguish it from .- References :* Van Aswegen, Jacobus. 2008...
  
   43%

Language status

The language is the official language in the Welayta

Welayta

Welaytta may refer to:* Welayta people, an ethnic group of Ethiopia* Welaytta language, spoken by the Welayta people...

 zone of Ethiopia. The Ethnologue cites statistics that 5% to 25% of the population are literate in this language. Portions of the Bible were produced in 1934, the New Testament in 1981, and the entire Bible in 2002.

Linguistic description

Like other Omotic languages, the Wolaytta language has the basic word order SOV (subject–object–verb). It also has ejective consonants, but is notable in Ethiopia for having /p/ instead of /f/.

Further reading

• Abebe, Alemayehu. 2002. "Sociolinguistic survey report on the Ometo dialect of Ethiopia, part II."‭ SIL Electronic Survey Reports 2002-012.
• Adams, Bruce A. 1983. A Tagmemic Analysis of the Wolaitta Language. Unpublished PhD. thesis, University of London.
• Adams, Bruce. 1990. Name nouns in Wolaitta. In Omotic Language Studies ed. by 406-412. London: School of Oriental and African Studies.
• Lamberti, Marcello and Roberto Sottile. 1997. "The Wolaytta Language". In Studia Linguarum Africae Orientalis 6: pp. 79–86. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe.
• Ohman, Walter and Hailu Fulass. 1976. Welamo. In Language in Ethiopia, ed. by M. L. Bender, C. Bowen, R. Cooper, and C. Ferguson, pp. 155–164. Oxford University Press.

External links

• World Atlas of Language Structures
  World Atlas of Language Structures
  The World Atlas of Language Structures is a database of structural properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials. It was first published by Oxford University Press as a book with CD-ROM in 2005, and was released as the second edition on the Internet in April 2008...
  
  information on Wolaytta