Northern Somali (Af-Maxaa): the dialect group behind Standard Somali

Where it is spoken

Northern Somali is spoken by more than 70% of all Somalis, according to Marcello Lamberti's 1986 dialect map (Northern Somali, Wikipedia, citing Lamberti 1986; the map is reproduced in Landinfo 2011, pp. 17 to 22). Its speech area runs from Djibouti and the northwest through the northeast, the Somali Region of Ethiopia and northern Kenya. B. W. Andrzejewski and I. M. Lewis linked this wide spread to southward population movements from the Gulf of Aden coast over many centuries (Andrzejewski and Lewis, Somali Poetry, 1964, p. 6).

Three subgroups, and a fourth in Kenya

Lamberti divides Northern Somali into three subgroups (Landinfo 2011, p. 10):

1. Northern Somali proper, in Awdal, Woqooyi Galbeed, Togdheer and Sanaag. It includes Ciise, Gadabuursi and the Isaaq dialects. Djibouti and Zeylac use the Ciise dialect (Landinfo 2011, p. 6).
2. The Daarood group, in Bari, Nugaal and Mudug, the Ogaden of Ethiopia, northern Bakool and Gedo. It includes the Majeerteen, Dhulbahante, Mareexaan, Degodiya, Warsangeli and Ogaadeen dialects.
3. The Lower Juba group, spoken by families who moved from the north to the Lower Juba in the 1800s. Because the coast there was Benadir-speaking, these dialects carry clear Benadir features.

Lamberti also proposed a fourth subgroup in northern Kenya, with Ogaadeen, Harti and Degodiya dialects (Landinfo 2011, p. 11). He found the first two subgroups very uniform, even though they are the mother tongue of more than half the population.

How it sounds

Lamberti lists the features that mark Northern Somali (Landinfo 2011, p. 11):

• the throat sounds written c and x;
• a difference between q and kh, as in qal ("slaughter!") and khal;
• the definite article fixed to the end of the noun, as in ninku ("the man");
• plurals of short masculine nouns made by repeating part of the word, as in san ("nose"), sanan ("noses").

Inside the group there are local marks. In Ciise, Gadabuursi and Isaaq speech the letter dh stays a hard "d" sound between vowels, as in yidhi ("he said"); elsewhere it softens to an "r" sound, giving yiri. In the Daarood group the letter j is often said like "ch", so joog ("stay!") sounds like choog (Landinfo 2011, p. 11). The linguist Giorgio Banti has studied the many Arabic and Harari loanwords in Northern Somali (Banti, Strata of loanwords in Northern Somali).

Base of the written standard

John Saeed notes that Northern Somali was used by famous poets and by the political class, which gave it the most prestige (Northern Somali, Wikipedia, citing Saeed, Somali, 1999, p. 5). Lamberti wrote that the Daarood dialects of Mudug and the Ogaden became the model for school books and radio after 1972 (Landinfo 2011, p. 8). Martin Orwin of SOAS told Landinfo that Standard Somali is in practice "a range of different dialects and forms of expression" rather than one fixed norm (Landinfo 2011, p. 8).

It is also the dialect most studied by linguists, above all the Isaaq dialect. Lamberti notes a grammar of the Majeerteen dialect in 1955 and dictionaries in 1962 and 1976 (Landinfo 2011, p. 11).

Read more

• Somali dialects
• Somali poetry
• How Somali became a written language in 1972