I want to preface by saying I'm so sorry that this post is a couple of days late. I misunderstood and thought because we had a test on Tuesday there was no Discussion Post due this past Sunday but when checking the calendar of assignments today I saw that we did have a DP due.
Afaan Oromo is a part of the Afroasiatic language family and more specifically falls under the Cushtic family branch. There are about 300 languages in the Afroasiatic family and it is made up of seven different branches. A majority of these languages are spoken in Africa with some also being spoken in geographic subregions of Western Asia. Oromo is spoken both in Ethiopia and Northern Kenya. It is the most widely spoken Cushitic language and one out of five of the languages in Africa with the largest number of mother-tongue speakers. Afaan Oromo follows a Latin orthography, which the language formally adopted in the late`1900s, called Qubee. The phonology of Afaan Oromo, although a part of distinct branches of the Afroasiatic language family, due to close contact shares sounds, words, and structures with other Ethiopian languages. For instance, many of the consonant sounds in the Oromo language, likewise to other Ethiopian languages, are voiceless glottal stops characterized by an explosive burst of air when producing the sound. Additionally, there are some identical words but not as many as I would have presumed given the close contact nature of Oromo and Amharic. As a native Amharic speaker, this evidently enhances my understanding of the Oromo language and helps me in speaking it with more ease (accent-wise) than I have when learning French for example. But also, because they are distinct languages, (not to toot my own horn) this ease in terms of picking up the language's accent has been a pattern for other languages I have spoken (Italian) evinced by positive comments from locals regarding my accent.
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