Gurage languages

The Gurage languages (Gurage: ጉራጌ Guragē, also known as Guragie) is a dialect-continuum language, which belong to the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken by the Gurage people, who inhabit the Gurage Zone within the larger multi-ethnic Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' Region in central Ethiopia.

Overview[]

The Gurage dialects form the Gurague Af or language, and Guraginya in Italian. Almost all of the dialects are intelligible with other dialects indicating that they have organic relationship as well as indicating that they originated from a proto-Gurage language. Gurage Af and its dialects belong to the Southern subdivision of the Ethiopian Semitic languages within the Afroasiatic family. The languages are often referred to collectively as "Guraginya" by other Ethiopians (-inya is the Amharic suffix for most Ethiopian Semitic languages).

There are three major dialect subgroups: Northern, Eastern and Western. All the Gurage subgroups (Northern, Western, and Eastern Gurage) belong to South Ethiopic. East Gurage is related to Harari and Gafat, while Northern and Western Gurage are related to each other.

The Gurage Af is written with the Ge'ez script. The Gurage subset of this script has 44 independent glyphs.

In april 2021 the gurage language become the media language in OBN horn of africa.^{[citation needed]}

In June 2021 Gurage Media Network established as well as fund raising ceremony in yod Abysinia hotel held.

Languages[]

In the following listing, the distinction between languages and dialects follows Ethnologue.

In the Northern group

• Soddo (Kistane)
  • Dialects: Soddo, Goggot (Dobi)

• Zay (Zway)

In the Western group

• Sebat Bet Gurage
  • Dialects: Chaha, Ezha, Gumer, Gura, Muher, Mesqan, Inor

Sebat Bet (or Sebat Beit), in particular, is best understood as a grouping in itself; the term means literally "Seven Houses," and refers to seven specific Western Gurage groups and varieties.

References[]

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