Kunama (language)
| Kunama | ||
|---|---|---|
|
Spoken in |
Eritrea | |
| speaker | approx. 109,000 | |
| Linguistic classification |
|
|
| Official status | ||
| Recognized minority / regional language in |
 Eritrea
|
|
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639 -1 |
- |
|
| ISO 639 -2 |
ssa |
|
| ISO 639-3 |
kun |
|
Kunama (also: Baza , Bada o. Ä.) Is the language of the Kunama people who live in the highlands in western Eritrea .
It is spoken by over 100,000 people and is considered a separate branch within the Nilo-Saharan language family .
The Kunama has the basic word sequence subject-object-verb .
In Eritrea, Kunama is recognized as one of nine “national languages” that are formally regarded as equal - in fact, Tigrinya and Arabic are by far the most important official languages.
literature
- M. Lionel Bender: Kunama . LINCOM Europe, Munich 1996.
- M. Lionel Bender: English-Kunama lexicon . In: African Working Papers (AAP) . Vol. 65, 2001, pp. 201-253.
- Giuseppe Fermo: Grammatica della lingua cunama . Missione Francescana, Asmara 1938.
- Giuseppe Fermo: Vocabolario della lingua cunama . Rome 1950.
- Leo Reinisch : The Kunama language in Northeast Africa . In: Session reports of the Philosophical-Historical Class of the Imperial Academy of Sciences . Vienna 1881–1891.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Marie-Claude Simeone-Senelle: Les langues en Erythrée , in: Chroniques Yeménites 8, 2000 (French)