The Afar language is spoken as a mother tongue by the Afar people in Djibouti, Eritrea, and the Afar Region of Ethiopia. According to Ethnologue, there are 1,379,200 total Afar speakers. Of these, 1,280,000 were recorded in the 2007 Ethiopian census, with 906,000 monolinguals registered in the 1994 census.
Official status
In Djibouti, Afar is a recognized national language. It is also one of the broadcasting languages of the Radio Television of Djibouti public network. In Eritrea, Afar is recognized as one of nine national languages which formally enjoy equal status although Tigrinya and Arabic are by far of greatest significance in official usage. There are daily broadcasts on the national radio and a translated version of the Eritrean constitution. In education, however, Afar speakers prefer Arabic – which many of them speak as a second language – as the language of instruction. In the Afar Region of Ethiopia, Afar is also recognized as an official working language.
Phonology
Consonants
The consonants of the Afar language in the standard orthography are listed below : Voiceless stop consonants which close syllables are released, e.g.,.
Vowels and stress
Sentence final vowels of affirmative verbs are aspirated, e.g. abeh = 'He did.' Sentence final vowels of negative verbs are not aspirated, e.g. maabinna = 'He did not do.' Sentence final vowels of interrogative verbs are lengthened, e.g. abee? = 'Did he do?' Otherwise, stress in word-final.
Phonotactics
Possible syllable shapes are V, VV, VC, VVC, CV, CVV and CVVC.
In Ethiopia, Afar is written with the Ge'ez script. Since around 1849, the Latin script has been used in other areas to transcribe the language. Additionally, Afar is also transcribed using the Arabic script. In the early 1970s, two Afar intellectuals and nationalists, Dimis and Redo, formalized the Afar alphabet. Known as Qafar Feera, the orthography is based on the Latin script. Officials from the Institut des Langues de Djibouti, the Eritrean Ministry of Education, and the Ethiopian Afar Language Studies and Enrichment Center have since worked with Afar linguists, authors and community representatives to select a standard orthography for Afar from among the various existing writing systems used to transcribe the language.
