Afar language

Geographic distribution

The Afar language is spoken as a mother tongue by the Afar people in Djibouti, Eritrea, and the Afar Region of Ethiopia.

According to Ethnologue, there are 2,600,000 total Afar speakers. Of these, 1,280,000 were recorded in the 2007 Ethiopian census, with 906,000 monolinguals registered in the 1994 census.

Official status

In Djibouti, Afar is a recognized national language. It is also one of the broadcasting languages of the Radio Television of Djibouti public network.

In Eritrea, Afar is recognized as one of nine national languages which formally enjoy equal status although Tigrinya and Arabic are by far of greatest significance in official usage. There are daily broadcasts on the national radio and a translated version of the Eritrean constitution. In education, however, Afar speakers prefer Arabic – which many of them speak as a second language – as the language of instruction.

In the Afar Region of Ethiopia, Afar is also recognized as an official working language. Since 2020, Afar is one of the five official working languages of Ethiopia.

Phonology

Consonants

The consonants of the Afar language in the standard orthography are listed below in angle brackets (preceded by the IPA notation):

Voiceless stop consonants which close syllables are released, e.g., .

may be realized as a tap or lose its retroflexion as in certain dialects.

Vowels and stress

Sentence final vowels of affirmative verbs are aspirated (and stressed), e.g.

• Afar: abeh = 'He did.'

Sentence final vowels of negative verbs are not aspirated (nor stressed), e.g.

• Afar: maabinna = 'He did not do.'

Sentence final vowels of interrogative verbs are lengthened (and stressed), e.g.

• Afar: abee? = 'Did he do?'

Otherwise, stress in word-final.

Phonotactics

Possible syllable shapes are V, VV, VC, VVC, CV, CVV and CVVC.

Syntax

As in most other Cushitic languages, the basic word order in Afar is subject–object–verb.

Writing system

In Ethiopia, Afar used to be written with the Ge'ez script (Ethiopic script). Since around 1849, the Latin script has been used in other areas to transcribe the language. Additionally, Afar is also transcribed using the Arabic script.

In the early 1970s, two Afar intellectuals and nationalists, Dimis and Redo, formalized the Afar alphabet. Known as Qafar Feera, the orthography is based on the Latin script.

Officials from the Institut des Langues de Djibouti, the Eritrean Ministry of Education, and the Ethiopian Afar Language Studies and Enrichment Center have since worked with Afar linguists, authors and community representatives to select a standard orthography for Afar from among the various existing writing systems used to transcribe the language.

Latin alphabet

Long vowels are represented by doubling. The letters P p, J j, V v and the digraphs Ch ch, Kh kh, Sh sh are used in loanwords.