Forms of Oromo are spoken as a first language by an additional half-million people in parts of northern and eastern Kenya.
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11 Facts About Oromo language
2.
Under Haile Selassie's regime, Oromo language was banned in education, in conversation, and in administrative matters.
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3.
The first printing of a transliteration of Oromo language was in 1846 in a German newspaper in an article on the Oromo in Germany.
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4.
All Oromo language materials printed in Ethiopia at that time, such as the newspaper, and many others, were written in the traditional Ethiopic script.
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5.
The first comprehensive online Oromo language dictionary was developed by the Jimma Times Oromiffa Group in cooperation with SelamSoft.
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6.
Oromo language is written with a Latin alphabet called which was formally adopted in 1991.
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7.
Sapalo script was an indigenous Oromo language script invented by Sheikh Bakri Sapalo in the late 1950s, and used underground afterwards.
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8.
Oromo language has another glottalized phone that is more unusual, an implosive retroflex stop, "dh" in Oromo language orthography, a sound that is 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.
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9.
Oromo language has the typical Eastern Cushitic set of five short and five long vowels, indicated in the orthography by doubling the five vowel letters.
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10.
Oromo language has no indefinite articles, but it indicates definiteness with suffixes on the noun: icha for masculine nouns and ittii for feminine nouns.
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11.
Oromo language nouns appear in seven grammatical cases, each indicated by a suffix, the lengthening of the noun's final vowel, or both.
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