Somali Grammar

Christopher R. Green, Nicola Lampitelli, Evan Jones, Nicola Lampitelli, Evan Jones

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781501511653
• eBook ISBN: 9781501503511
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book offers a contemporary look at Somali from the standpoint of its major varieties and provides a comprehensive account of the language that is grounded in linguistic theory and the latest scholarship. The grammar includes an extensive array of examples drawn from online corpora and from fieldwork with native speakers of the language.

1 Introduction

1.1 Background

Somali, or Af-Soomaali, is the official language of the Federal Republic of Somalia. Somali is also spoken in parts of neighboring Djibouti, Ethiopia, and in Kenya, as well as in diaspora communities concentrated in a growing number of cities in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Somali is identified by the official registration authority for human languages with the International Organization for Standardization code [som] under ISO 639-3. Its Glottocode (glottolog.org) is soma1255.

It is estimated that there are approximately 16 million Somali speakers worldwide, most of whom are mother tongue (L1) speakers of the language (Eberhard et al., 2019). However, only approximately half of these individuals reside in Somalia itself. This distribution stems in large part from longstanding political instability and dangerous conditions in some parts of Somalia that have contributed to a flow of emigrants and refugees out of the Horn of Africa over many decades. Efforts aimed at partial repatriation supported by the United Nations Refugee Agency have met with only moderate success. The International Organization for Migration reports that thousands of migrants continue to flow each year out of South-Central Somalia in particular.

Linguistic research on Somali has enjoyed a long history, though the political situation in and around Somalia has hindered in situ research on the language for many years. Despite this, linguists have continued to work with speakers in diaspora communities around the globe, and there has been a noticeable uptick in new research emerging on Somali in the past decade. This research has primarily been undertaken by linguists whose consultants have resettled in different areas of the world. These diaspora varieties of Somali sometimes reveal subtle divergences from what is reported in the older descriptive linguistics literature and that is presumably representative of the Somali spoken (at least historically) in Somalia and its environs.

The research upon which this book is based grew out of such consultation with two diaspora Somali speakers living in the Washington, DC metro area. The primary goal of this earlier work conducted at the University of Maryland’s former Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL) was the creation of a teaching grammar for adult English-speaking learners of Somali. I served as the co-Principal Investigator overseeing the Somali project alongside Dr. Michelle Morrison. Upon leaving the University of Maryland, I began subsequent research aimed at reconfiguring and expanding the content contained in the teaching grammar, the product of which is the current book. This research was done in consultation with Somali speakers located in Sweden and facilitated by Professor Laura Downing and Senior Lecturer Morgan Nilsson at the University of Gothenburg, as well as with Somali speakers located in Syracuse, NY.

This book is about Somali grammar, but it does not pretend to be comprehensive. There is widespread variation among Somali speakers in many facets of the language, and there are many varieties that fall under the Somali umbrella that I have not encountered personally. As such, this book is not necessarily representative of all Somali varieties and all Somali speakers. In writing this book, I have focused on two modest goals. First, I aim to highlight findings that have emerged in the linguistics literature on Somali since Saeed’s seminal 1999 reference grammar, such as in the areas of gender and number inflection, the connection between prosodic structure and morphophonological alternations, the language’s tonal system, and compounding, among other topics. Of course, there is a great deal of new research that has emerged on Somali syntax as well. I hope that the reader will find the current work to be more comprehensive than Saeed (1999) in that it includes a number of topics that were not represented or otherwise not discussed in detail by Saeed. A second goal of this book is to bring into balance what we know about Somali phonology and morphology and the role that prosodic structure plays in its grammar relative to the much richer literature that has concentrated on the language’s syntax and information structure.

1.2 Somali in Somalia and beyond

Compared to most other African countries where dozens, if not hundreds of indigenous languages are spoken, Somalia is, linguistically, fairly homogeneous. Somali is, by far, the most widely spoken first language in Somalia. Other Cushitic languages (e.g., Maay and Ashraaf, among others) are spoken in areas primarily in the southern part of the country. In addition, there are several ethnic minorities concentrated along Somalia’s southern coast who speak other non-Cushitic languages, among these being Somali Bantus who speak coastal varieties of Swahili such as Zigula (also called Mushunguli or Mushungulu), ChiMwiini, and Bajuni. Even among these groups, Somali is a lingua franca, at least among some cross-section of the population. Lamberti (1984) reports that among minority ethnic groups, Somali is mostly spoken as a second language (L2) by men and children, while women tend not to use the language. It is without a doubt that longstanding unrest and the precarious state of the political climate in Somalia has also contributed greatly to its linguistic landscape.

Within Somalia itself, clan membership and a culture of nomadic pastoralism have contributed to the insular nature of certain populations and their languages. Though historical resources like Lewis (1955, 1999, 2002, 2010) describe a high degree of nationalist cohesion among Somalis, it is clan membership that forms the strongest ties within Somali society. There is an overarching emphasis on clan identity, and clan allegiance is often valued more highly than allegiance to the state itself. However, while clan allegiances are significant, so too are clan cleavages (Gajraj et al. 2005), which some suggest have historically been exploited by government officials for political gain (Kleist 2008).

Somali clans are patrineal and trace their origins to a single male ancestor (Hagi and Hagi 1998). The primary clan division in Somalia is between the Samaale and the Sab. The term “Somali” itself has its roots in the name of the Samaale clan, though see Mansur (1984) for a different interpretation. Lewis (1955) and Abdullahi (2000) argue that the members of Sab sub-clans do not consider themselves to be Somalis owing to this etymological connection to the Samaale clan. As one might imagine, this further strains national cohesion.

It is important to arrive at some sense of the Somali clan structure as it sometimes pertains to linguistic description. For example, there are older works written about Somali that define a given variety based on clan name. See, for example, works on Isaaq Somali by Andrzejewski (1955, 1956). Also, and from a more practical standpoint, clan division has true linguistic correlates. That is, the Samaale group consists of four main clans – Isaaq, Hawiye, Dir, and Daarood. Individuals within these clans speak varieties or dialects that generally fall under the modern linguistic conception of the Somali language. Within the Sab clan, there are two major sub-clans - Digil and Rahanweyn (also called Maay) - whose members, as discussed in §1.3, speak language varieties that are contemporarily considered to be altogether different languages from Somali.

I have included a political map of what is generally thought of as the physical extent of Somalia in Figure 1.1, though the situation is far more complicated than this map would lead one to believe. This is unsurprising given that the political boundaries of most African nations were arbitrarily drawn by Europeans colonialists. As such, there are sizable populations of Somali speakers living in modern day eastern Kenya, in Djibouti, and in the Somali (formerly Ogaden) region of Ethiopia. Though Somalis are among the minority in these other nations, they enjoy benefits and protections not afforded to them in their homeland.

The arbitrary nature of Somalia’s physical boundaries compared to the extent of what is historically ethnic Somali territory is still apparent today. This is because colonial Somalia was once divided into four administrative regions claimed by the United Kingdom, Italy, France, and Ethiopia. French claims ultimately became modern-day Djibouti, while Ethiopian claims were incorporated into Ethiopia and constitute that country’s eastern Somali region mentioned just above. Land claimed by the United Kingdom constitutes the present day de facto sovereign territory of Somaliland which extends inland from the Gulf of Aden. ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Orthography
• 3 Segmental Phonology
• 4 Syllable structure and phonotactics
• 5 Tone
• 6 Nominal morphology
• 7 Verbs and verbal morphology
• 8 Compounds
• 9 The noun phrase
• 10 The Verb Complex
• 11 Focus markers
• 12 Main clauses without focus marking
• 13 Information structure
• 14 Subordination
• 15 Coordination and other adverbials
• 16 Questions
• A Appendix - Suffixing verb paradigms
• Index