What is the difference between somali and arabic

The vowels can be short or long. Vowel length makes a difference in word meaning. In the table below, long vowels are marked by a macron over the vowel. In the orthography, long vowels are represented by a double vowel, e. In addition to short and long vowels, Somali has numerous diphthongs.

Somali has 24 consonants. These sounds occur only in borrowed words. The language is rich in velar , uvular , pharyngeal , and glottal consonants, sounds that are produced at the back of the oral cavity. The tonal system of Somali is similar to that of Oromo.

There are three basic tones: high marked by an acute accent , low marked by a grave accent , and falling marked by a circumflex accent.

Somali tone operates at the grammatical, rather than at the lexical level, as it does in languages such as Chinese. Stress typically falls on the final or on the penultimate vowel of a word. Somali is an agglutinative language that uses suffixes attached to roots for representing grammatical information. Somali verbs consist of a stem to which suffixes are added.

Verbs in indicative mood exist in four tenses, present, present continuous, past and past continuous, in addition to a subjunctive mood form for present and future tense.

Verbs in Somali conjugate mainly through the addition of suffixes, although a very small number of common verbs maintain an archaic conjugation using prefixes. Verbs are marked for the following categories:.

Word order in Somali sentences is typically Subject-Object-Verb. In general, Somali has a topic-focus grammatical category that marks the information structure of sentences, i. Somali vocabulary is Cushitic in origin. The most productive ways of word derivation are reduplication and compounding.

Somali has been heavily influenced by Arabic mainly through the medium of Islam. It has also borrowed words from the languages of its former colonizers, such as Italian , English , and French. Somali was not written until the Osmanya alphabet was developed in Osmanya is written from left to right in horizontal rows. The names of the letters were taken from Arabic. The Latin alphabet was adopted in Below is the current Somali Latin-based alphabet with the letters listed in the traditional Arabic order.

There is no standardized orthography so variations occur. How difficult is it to learn Somali? There is no information on the difficulty level of Somali for speakers of English. Toggle navigation. Article Rating. Leave Comments. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Comment.

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We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. Somali is fun and aint that difficult at all. Hello Richard I have just stumbled upon this. Is the site still active? I want to share with you interesting information about the Somali language. Very interesting article! It seems you have special talent for languages. You provided a lot of important information about languages.

I love it for its malleability and quirks, but Gosh, I could never be mad at any immigrant for being baffled by it. Amazing, as a Somali American, I appreciate your interest personally and culturally in the language. I came here at a young age which allowed me to master English, to an extent, however I have always had a feeling of not fully knowing my native language.

It is a HARD language. When I hear somali poetry it is almost a foreign language to me. And Bashir is a close friend of mine. Good luck, aad baa u mahadsantahai. Like Liked by 1 person. Thank you for sharing your experience in learning Somali. I am a Somali and and I used to say that because Somali language is so difficult, all other languages become so easy for somalis.

I thought I was proven wrong when I met so many Minnesotans that speak Somali. Are there other course? BTW do you have a lot of Somalis where you live? Have you looked into finding a local teacher?

I understand that OSU offers a course. But I was in search of resources outside a classroom environment. There are so few people learning Somali as a foreign language that materials are hard to come by. Liban Axmad also, Ahmad has written some stuff. He is someone who clearly loves the language and writes out of love.

He does some really helpful linguistic analysis, too. Pingback: The hard work of loving language Loving Language. I do however, chide you for not covering the difficult sounds and tones found in old Somali; afMaay. Thank you so much! What great information! Do you have any sources I can look at to learn more?

Please feel free to ask me any questions you might have. I have some experience teaching it. Mandarin is popularly pushed in Australian schools we want good relations with China , but Arabic is consigned to community evening-schools, so Mandarin would probably rate higher on a list here than Arabic would because more people complain about it! There is already a decision process for what languages will be considered easy or hard: Would people even bother learning it?

Sad but true…. All my life I used to here scorn and contempt from my fellow Somalis of thier mother tongue most of them believing it being a collection of other languages and when I made my own research I found out that it is the source or the origin from which other languages developed or came from! Now for the prove neither the English nor the Arabs understand it this way or are able to explain it as I have done.

Bye for now and please it will be a pleasure to hear from you. Hi im somali-finish boy from finland and i think somali and finish are among the hardest languages.

Finnish with its endless cases and somali with its pronounces. I disagree. Somali is easier than Arabic because it uses the European letters as in French etc.

That makes it easier than Farsi too. Good point, Robert. Using the Latin alphabet does help in the beginning. But I found that alphabets in languages can be learned much more quickly than tricky grammar. I find Farsi grammar and pronunciation easier than Somali and Arabic since my native English is also an Indo-European language. Also, when you go back before , different alphabets were used, including the Arabic script.

Hi, Great article! Whenever I have to read or write in it I usually use google translator because it takes way too long to sound it out. I find it really easy to pronounce words in many languages. By the way, I use to be trilingual in Somali, Swahili, and English. But when I became fluent in English I forgot Swahili.

I also plan to learn Arabic. Many of my family members speak many languages, so I really want to be fluent in many languages. Pingback: Good news! Loving Language. Hi, interesting article!

I never knew those stuff about the Somali language. Pingback: nepjournal. In Somali alphabets there is no v , p , z the sound of x and the sound of q indeed we have x with another sound and q for another sound,,, but never mind that Somali language is hard..

Great article. I found a wonderful book years ago. This book was written long time ago. This is by far the best Somalia learning book. It was put there in the late 80s when the first Somalia migrant moved to the US and in Canada. Here is the book in a PDF format:. Thanks for the tip! Could you kindly offer some more instructions?

Hi Loving Language, I myself, I love languages. However, Somali is an interesting language for several reasons: first, its reach in folklore songs, poems, proverbs, riddles, traditional dances, etc.

They are not dying after more than two decades of civil war but still they are faring well in places like Nairobi, Kampala, Minnesota, Seattle, London, Dubai, etc. They are baffling the world with their Piracy, Al-Shabab, etc. However, the greatest danger to the Somali language is Arabic which many later day Somali Co-coreligionists think is more important than the Somali language.

However, the overarching issue was the development of a socioeconomic stratum based on mastery of a foreign language. The relatively small proportion of Somalis less than 10 percent with a grasp of such a language--preferably English--had access to government positions and the few managerial or technical jobs in modern private enterprises.

Such persons became increasingly isolated from their nonliterate Somali-speaking brethren, but because the secondary schools and most government posts were in urban areas the socioeconomic and linguistic distinction was in large part a rural-urban one.

To some extent, it was also a north-south distinction because those educated in the Italian system and even in Italian universities found it increasingly difficult to reach senior government levels. Even before the revolution, Somalis had become aware of social stratification and the growing distance, based on language and literacy differences, between ordinary Somalis and those in government.

The decision to designate an official Somali script and require its use in government demolished the language barrier and an important obstacle to rapid literacy growth. In the years following the institution of the Somali script, Somali officials were required to learn the script and attempts were made to inculcate mass literacy--in among urban and rural sedentary Somalis, and in among nomads.