El Molo language

El Molo is a possibly extinct language belonging to the Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family. It was spoken by the El Molo people on the southeastern shore of Lake Turkana, in northern Kenya. It was thought to be extinct in the middle part of the 20th century, but a few speakers were found in the later 20th century.^[1] However, it may now be truly extinct, as the eight speakers found in a survey published in 1994 were over 50. Most of the El Molo population have shifted to the neighboring Samburu language.^[1]

Notes

Further reading

• Heine, Bernd. 1980. Elmolo. In Heine, Bernd (ed.), The Non-Bantu Languages of Kenya, 173-218. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer.
• Heine, Bernd. 1972/73. Vokabulare ostafrikanischer Restsprachen, 1: Elmolo. Afrika und Übersee 56. 276-283.
• Scherrer, Carol. 1974. Effects of western influence on Elmolo, 1973-74. (Discussion papers from the Inst. of African Studies (IAS), 61.) Nairobi: University of Nairobi.
• Tosco, Mauro. 2012. What Terminal Speakers Can Do to Their Language: the Case of Elmolo. In Corriente, Federico and Gregorio del Olmo Lete and Vicente, Ángeles and Vita, Juan-Pablo (eds.), Dialectology of the Semitic Languages. Proceedings of the IV Meeting on Comparative Semitics, Zaragoza, 131-143. Sabadell (Barcelona): Editorial AUSA.

External links

• El Molo at the Endangered Languages Project
• NTV Video on the El Molo