| Dahlik | ||
|---|---|---|
| Dahaalik, Dahalik, Dahlak | ||
| Spoken in | Eritrea | |
| Region | Dahlak Archipelago | |
| Total speakers | 2,500–3,000 | |
| Language family | Afro-Asiatic | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1 | None | |
| ISO 639-2 | sem | |
| ISO 639-3 | und | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. | ||
Dahlik (Dahaalik, Dahalik, Dahlak) is a language spoken exclusively in Eritrea off the coast of Massawa, on three islands in the Dahlak Archipelago: Dahlak Kebir, Nora and Dehil. Only recently discovered by linguists, it has around 2,500–3,000 speakers.
It belongs to the Afro-Asiatic language group and is quite closely related to Tigre and Tigrinya. It is mutually intelligible with Tigre (see Shaebia below), but, according to Simeone-Senelle, is sufficiently different to be considered a separate language.
References
- Simeone-Senelle, Marie-Claude. 2000. 'Situation linguistique dans le sud de l'Erythrée', in Wolff/Gensler (eds) Proceedings of the 2nd World Congress of African Linguistics, 1997, Köln: Köppe, p. 261-276.
External links
- Shaebia: Dahlak, a newly discovered Afro-Semitic language spoken exclusively in EritreaPDF (122 KiB)
- Shaebia: Dahalik - Mysterious Tongue of the Dahlak Islands
- Aljazeera: Lost Eritrean language put on record
 |
This Eritrea-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
 |
This Afro-Asiatic languages-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
