Oromo is an Afroasiatic language belonging to the Cushitic branch, primarily spoken by the Oromo people, native to the Ethiopian state of Oromia and northern Kenya. It is used as a lingua franca in Oromia and northeastern Kenya. It is officially written in the Latin script, although traditional scripts are also informally used.

With more than 41.7 million speakers making up 33.8% of the total Ethiopian population, Oromo has the largest number of native speakers in Ethiopia and ranks as the second most widely spoken language in Ethiopia by total number of speakers (including second-language speakers), following Amharic. Forms of Oromo are spoken as a first language by an additional half-million people in parts of northern and eastern Kenya. It is also spoken by smaller numbers of emigrants in other African countries such as South Africa, Libya, Egypt and Sudan. Oromo is the most widely spoken Cushitic language and among the five languages of Africa with the largest mother-tongue populations.

Oromo serves as one of the official working languages of Ethiopia and is also the working language of several of the states within the Ethiopian federal system, including Oromia, Harari Region, Dire Dawa and Oromia in the Amhara Region. It is a language of primary education in Oromia, Harari, Dire Dawa, Benishangul-Gumuz Region and Addis Ababa. It is used as an internet language for federal websites along with Tigrinya. Under Haile Selassie's government, Oromo was de facto banned in education, in conversation and in administrative matters.

Varieties

Ethnologue (2015) assigns five ISO codes to Oromo: Southern Oromo (Boranaa–Arsii–Gujii, including the Gabra and Sakuye dialects), ISO code [gax] Eastern Oromo (Harar), ISO code [hae] Orma (Munyo, Orma, Waata/Sanye), ISO code [orc] West Central Oromo (Western Oromo and Central Oromo, including Mecha/Wollega, Raya, Wello (Kemise), Tulema/Shewa), ISO code [gaz] Waata, ISO code [ssn]

Blench (2006) divides Oromo into four languages: Western Oromo (Maccha) Shewa (Tuulama, Arsi) Eastern Oromo (Harar) Southern Oromo (Ajuran, Borana, Gabra, Munyo, Orma, Sakuye, Waata)

Some of the varieties of Oromo have been examined and classified.

Speakers About 85 percent of Oromo speakers live in Ethiopia, mainly in the Oromia Region. In addition, in Somalia there are also some speakers of the language. In Kenya, the Ethnologue also lists 627,000 speakers of Borana and Orma, two languages closely related to Ethiopian Oromo. Within Ethiopia, Oromo is the language with the largest number of native speakers.

Within Africa, Oromo is the language with the fourth most speakers, after Arabic (if one counts the mutually unintelligible spoken forms of Arabic as a single language and assumes the same for the varieties of Oromo), Swahili and Hausa.

Besides first language speakers, a number of members of other ethnicities who are in contact with the Oromo speak it as a second language. See, for example, the Omotic-speaking Bambassi and the Nilo-Saharan-speaking Kwama in northwestern Oromia.

Language policy The Oromo people use a highly developed oral tradition. In the 19th century, scholars began writing in the Oromo language using Latin script. In 1842, Johann Ludwig Krapf began translations of the Gospels of John and Matthew into Oromo, as well as a first grammar and vocabulary. The first Oromo dictionary and grammar was produced by German scholar Karl Tutschek in 1844. The first printing of a transliteration of Oromo language was in 1846 in a German newspaper in an article on the Oromo in Germany.

After Abyssinia's southward expansion under Menelik II, the language's development into a full-fledged writing instrument was interrupted. The few works that had been published, most notably Onesimos Nesib's and Aster Ganno's translations of the Bible from the late 19th century, were written in the Geʽez alphabet. Following the 1974 Revolution, the government undertook a literacy campaign in several languages, including Oromo, and publishing and radio broadcasts began in the language. All Oromo materials printed in Ethiopia at that time, such as the newspaper , and many others, were written in the traditional Ethiopic script.

Plans to introduce Oromo language instruction in schools, however, were not realized until the government of Mengistu Haile Mariam was overthrown in 1991, except in regions controlled by the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF). With the creation of the regional state of Oromia under the new system of ethnic federalism in Ethiopia, it became possible to introduce Oromo as the medium of instruction in elementary schools throughout the region, including areas where other ethnic groups live speaking their languages, and as a language of administration within the region. Ever since the OLF left the transitional Ethiopian government in the early 1990s, the Oromo Peoples' Democratic Organization (OPDO) continued furthering the development of the Oromo community in Ethiopia.

Radio broadcasts were begun in the Oromo language in Somalia in 1960 by Radio Mogadishu. The programme featured music and propaganda. A song (Liberation Is Milk) became a hit in Ethiopia. To combat wide-reaching Somali influence, the Ethiopian government initiated an Oromo language radio programme of their own.Leenco Lata, The Ethiopian State at the Crossroads p.

Within Kenya, there has been radio broadcasting in Oromo (in the Borana dialect) on the Voice of Kenya since at least the 1980s. The Borana Bible in Kenya was printed in 1995 using the Latin alphabet, but not using the same spelling rules as in Ethiopian Qubee. The first comprehensive online Oromo dictionary was developed by the Jimma Times Oromiffa Group (JTOG) in cooperation with SelamSoft.

The Voice of America broadcasts in Oromo alongside its other Horn of Africa programmes. In May 2022, Google Translate added Afaan Oromo as translation. Oromo and Qubee are currently utilized by the Ethiopian government's state radios, TV stations and regional government newspaper.

Phonology and orthography

Writing systems

Oromo is written with a Latin alphabet called which was formally adopted in 1991. Various versions of the Latin-based orthography had been used previously, mostly by Oromos outside of Ethiopia and by the OLF by the late 1970s (Heine 1986). With the adoption of Qubee, it is believed more texts were written in the Oromo language between 1991 and 1997 than in the previous 100 years. In Kenya, the Borana and Waata also use Roman letters but with different systems.

The Shaaldaa script is an indigenous Oromo script invented by Sheikh Bakri Sapalo (1895–1980, also known by his birth name, Abubaker Usman Odaa) in the late 1950s and used underground afterwards. Despite structural and organizational influences from the Geʽez script and Arabic script, it is a graphically independent creation designed specifically for Oromo phonology. It is an abugida with most characters representing syllables (consonant+vowel), but also has characters to represent standalone vowels and standalone consonants. There are slightly different characters that represent geminated consonants+vowels. There are also "base glyphs" used purely in pedagogical materials, but are not used in writing language.

The Arabic script has also been used intermittently in areas with Muslim populations.

Consonant and vowel phonemes Like most other Ethiopian languages, whether Semitic, Cushitic, or Omotic, Oromo has a set of ejective consonants, that is, voiceless stops or affricates that are accompanied by glottalization and an explosive burst of air. Oromo has another glottalized phone that is more unusual: a implosive retroflex stop, "dh" in Oromo orthography. This is a sound like an English "d" produced with the tongue curled back slightly and with the air drawn in so that a glottal stop is heard before the following vowel begins. It is retroflex in most dialects, though it is not strongly implosive and may reduce to a flap between vowels. One source describes it as voiceless .

Oromo has the typical Eastern Cushitic set of five short and five long vowels, indicated in the orthography by doubling the five vowel letters. The difference in length is contrastive, for example, 'lake', 'new'. Gemination is also significant in Oromo. That is, consonant length can distinguish words from one another, for example, 'bad', 'highland'.

In the Qubee alphabet, letters include the digraphscalled Qubee Dachaa in the Oromo language. ch, dh, ny, ph, sh. Gemination is not obligatorily marked for digraphs, though some writers indicate it by doubling the first element: 'be prepared'. In the charts below, the International Phonetic Alphabet symbol for a phoneme is shown in brackets where it differs from the Oromo letter. The phonemes appear in parentheses because they are only found in recently adopted words. There have been minor changes in the orthography since it was first adopted: () was originally rendered , and there has been some confusion among authors in the use of and in representing the phonemes and , with some early works using for and for and even for different phonemes depending on where it appears in a word. This article uses consistently for and for .

+ Consonants Labial Alveolar/Retroflex Palato-alveolar Velar Glottal Plosives andAffricates voiceless () voiced ejective implosive Fricatives voiceless voiced () () Nasals Approximants Rhotic

+Vowels Front Central Back Close , , Mid , , Open

Tone and stress Only the penultimate or final syllable of a root can have a high tone, and if the penultimate is high, the final must also be high; this implies that Oromo has a pitch-accent system (in which the tone need be specified only on one syllable, the others being predictable) rather than a tone system (in which each syllable must have its tone specified), although the rules are complex (each morpheme can contribute its own tone pattern to the word), so that "one can call Oromo a pitch-accent system in terms of the basic lexical representation of pitch, and a tone system in terms of its surface realization." The stressed syllable is perceived as the first syllable of a word with high pitch.

Grammar

Nouns

Gender Similar to most other Afroasiatic languages, Oromo has two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine, and all nouns belong to either one or the other. Grammatical gender in Oromo enters into the grammar in the following ways: Verbs (except for the copula be) agree with their subjects in gender when the subject is third person singular (he or she). Third person singular personal pronouns (he, she, it etc. in English) have the gender of the noun they refer to. Adjectives agree with the nouns they modify in gender. Some possessive adjectives ("my", "your") agree with the nouns they modify in some dialects.

Except in some southern dialects, there is nothing in the form of most nouns that indicates their gender. A small number of nouns, however, end in (m.) and (f.), as do adjectives when they are used as nouns: 'brother', 'sister', 'the rich one (m.)', 'the poor one (f.)'. Grammatical gender normally agrees with natural gender for people and animals; thus nouns such as 'father', 'son' and 'ox' are masculine, while nouns such as 'mother' and 'girl, daughter' are feminine. However, most names for animals do not specify biological gender.

Names of astronomical bodies are feminine: 'sun', 'star'. The gender of other inanimate nouns varies somewhat among dialects.

Number Oromo displays singular and plural number, but nouns that refer to multiple entities are not obligatorily plural: 'man' 'people', 'five men', 'five people'. Another way of looking at this is to treat the "singular" form as unspecified for number.