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The Afar language (Afar: 'Qafár af') (also known as Adal, ’Afar Af, Afaraf, Qafar) is an Afro-Asiatic language, belonging to the family's Cushitic branch. It is spoken by the Afar people in Djibouti, Eritrea and Ethiopia.
Afar is classified within the Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family. It is further categorized in the Lowland East Cushitic sub-group, along with Saho and Somali.[3] Its closest relative is the Saho language.[4]
The Afar language is spoken as a mother tongue by the Afar people in Djibouti, Eritrea, and the Afar Region of Ethiopia.[4]
According to Ethnologue, there are 1,379,200 total Afar speakers. Of these, 1,280,000 were recorded in the 2007 Ethiopian census, with 906,000 monolinguals registered in the 1994 census.[4]
In Djibouti, Afar is a recognized national language.[5] It is also one of the broadcasting languages of the Radio Television of Djibouti public network.
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.[6]
In the Afar Region of Ethiopia, Afar is also recognized as an official working language.[7]
The consonants of the Afar language in the standard orthography are listed below (with IPA notation in brackets):
Voiceless stop consonants which close syllables are released, e.g., [ʌkʰˈme].
Sentence final vowels of affirmative verbs are aspirated (and stressed), e.g. abeh = /aˈbeʰ/ 'He did.' Sentence final vowels of negative verbs are not aspirated (nor stressed), e.g. maabinna = /ˈmaabinna/ 'He did not do.' Sentence final vowels of interrogative verbs are lengthened (and stressed), e.g. abee? = /aˈbeː/ 'Did he do?' Otherwise, stress in word-final.
As in most other Cushitic languages, the basic word order in Afar is subject–object–verb.[4]
Syllables are of the form (C)V(V)(C). One exception is the three-consonant cluster -str-.
In Ethiopia, Afar is written with the Ethiopic or Ge'ez script. Since around 1849, the Latin script has been used in other areas to transcribe the language.[4] Additionally, Afar is also transcribed using the Arabic script.[8]
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.[9]
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.[8]
South Cushitic languages, Somali language, Omotic languages, Beja language, Sudan
Sudan, Asmara, Ethiopia, Djibouti, Saudi Arabia
Somalia, Sudan, Egypt, Eritrea, Saudi Arabia
Barmen, Stuttgart, Church Missionary Society, Missionary, Linguist
Djibouti, Arabic language, French language, Afar people, French people
Cushitic languages, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Afro-Asiatic languages, Afar language
Eritrea, Arabic language, Sudan, Islam, Christianity