Somali · Af-Soomaali

About Somali

Language family

Afroasiatic, Cushitic branch

Where it's spoken

Somalia, the Ogaden region of Ethiopia, Djibouti, Kenya

Speakers

roughly 22 million speakers

Somali carries a strong oral literary tradition, especially in poetry, which functioned historically as a primary vehicle for law, history, and political debate in a largely nomadic pastoral society. Its Cushitic branch is a distinct family within Afroasiatic, related only distantly to Arabic and Hebrew's Semitic branch. Somalia officially adopted a Latin-based orthography for the language in 1972, after decades of debate over Arabic-, Latin-, and indigenous-script proposals.