1. Af-Soomaali

2.  Official language of Somalia  Ethiopia, Kenya, Djibouti  Diaspora in Middle East, Europe, North America  >6M speakers in Somalia  >14M worldwide  Cushitic branch of the Afro- Asiatic language family  Lexicon – Cushitic, Arabic, IE Somali Afro-Asiatic Languages

3. FrontCentralBack High i ɪʉ u Mid e ɛ ɞ ɔ Low æ ɑ  Front/Back series  Length Distinction  Front-Front, Back-Back Diphthongs Vowels Tone  3 tones – High, Low, Falling  Grammatical – Gender, Number, Case [daméer] – “male donkey” [dameér] – “female donkey”

4.  Nouns - Definiteness (2), Gender (2),Number (2), Case (4)  Pronouns - Emphatic/Short, Inclusive/Exclusive “We”  Verbs - Person, Number, Gender, Mood, Tense, Polarity  Focus Markers: baa, ayaa, waxa(a) - New information, contrastive emphasis

5.  Latin script, formerly Arabic and Osmanya scripts  No distinctions in tone or front/back versions of vowels

6.  ~4000 Wikipedia articles, news, social media  Asaas corpus – 10.5 hours of transcribed read-speech  Wargeys text corpus – 3 million words  ASR and MT (Google Translate)  No entries in MT Archive