For Students

This page is for people beginning serious work on the Somali language and its oral tradition — students, translators, and anyone who has decided to go beyond phrasebooks. It sets out what to read, in what order, and what to expect from the hardest part of the grammar.

Start with the sentence particles

If one thing separates a learner who has understood Somali syntax from one who has not, it is the particle system: waa, baa (with its variant ayaa) and waxaa.

Practically every independent affirmative sentence in Somali carries one of them. They are not optional emphasis, as European “word order for emphasis” would suggest — they are an obligatory grammatical mechanism that marks what the sentence is about and what is being said about it:

A learner who treats these as filler words will produce sentences that are grammatical nowhere. A learner who masters them early will find the rest of the syntax falls into place.

The full description is in Sentence Particles in the Somali Language and Their Usage in Proverbs (Shaker Verlag, Aachen, 2005), which grew out of a dissertation defended at the Institute of Asian and African Studies, Moscow State University, in 2000. See also Grammar & Syntax.

A reading order

First, the grammar. A. K. Zholkovsky’s Syntax of Somali (Moscow, 1971) remains the foundational description in Russian and was an event in international Africanist scholarship — among other things it established that the particle paradigm has three members, not two. Note that it predates the 1972 Latin orthography, so its spelling conventions are pre-standard.

Then, connected texts with a translation beside them. Faaliyihii la bilkeyday: Sheekaxariirooyin Soomaaliyeed (“A Soothsayer Tested: Somali Folktales”, 2006) prints 115 tales in Somali with a parallel English translation. For a learner this is the most useful format there is: real narrative language, with a check available at every sentence. The tales are grouped by type — mythological, animal tales, novelistic tales, and didactic tales.

Then the proverbs, in the right order. Do not begin with a six-thousand-entry dictionary. Begin with Hubsiimo hal baa la siistaa (Moscow, 2002), which sets out the 249 proverbs that a majority of speakers actually know — established by field experiment, not by editorial taste. Each entry gives the proverb, a translation, an explanation of the situation in which it is used, and the recorded variants. Learning those 249 gives you the working core.

Only afterwards is the Qaamuuska maahmaahyada Soomaaliyeed (1998) — over 6,000 documented paremias, trilingual — a reference you can navigate.

For the oral tradition in the original. Hikmad Soomaali by Muuse Xaaji Ismaaciil Galaal and B. W. Andrzejewski (1956) is the classic collection, and the source of the tale that gave the 2006 volume its name.

The full list is under Publications.

Recording proverbs and tales

If your work involves collecting material, the record is only as good as its context. A proverb noted without its setting is a curiosity; a proverb noted properly is data.

For each item, write down:

  1. The text itself, in the form you actually heard it — not corrected toward the “standard” version.
  2. Where you heard it — region and settlement, and which dialect the speaker uses.
  3. From whom — age, and whether the speaker grew up in a nomadic or urban environment. This matters: in the Berlin and Aarhus experiment, informants with a nomadic background knew markedly more proverbs than urban ones.
  4. The situation in which it was used — this is what turns a sentence into a usable entry, and it is the part most often lost.

Variants deserve particular attention. It is worth distinguishing a variation — a deviation that does not change the general meaning — from a variant, which modifies the meaning and may amount to a separate proverb with a different application. Grammatical modifications, lexical substitutions, reductions and expansions all behave differently, and lumping them together obscures what is happening.

A word on the archaic layer

About seven per cent of recorded Somali paremias contain no sentence particle at all, in constructions where a particle would normally be obligatory. These are not careless abbreviations. In part of them a particle cannot be reconstructed at all, which marks them as the oldest stratum of the proverbial stock — language older than the rule that now governs it. A student who notices such a form in the field has found something worth reporting.

Questions

Questions about usage, dialect forms, or the meaning of a difficult paremia are welcome — see Contact. If you are writing about a proverb or a tale you have recorded, include the details listed above; that is what makes it possible to say anything useful in reply.