The proverbs shown on this site

One of these appears on the front page each time it is loaded. The whole set is listed here.

Two hundred and forty-nine of them are the Somali paremiological minimum: the proverbs that the paremiological experiment found to be known to more than half of the speakers questioned. They are given below in the order the experiment established, from the one proverb every single respondent knew down to those known to just over half. That percentage is the finding, and it is what makes this list something other than an anthology.

The corpus comes from Hubsiimo hal baa la siistaa (Moscow, 2002). Four further proverbs are quoted in papers published on this site and can be read there in context.

Who holds what rights, and what may be reused without asking, is set out on the Terms & Copyright page. In short: the Somali proverbs are traditional and belong to no one. The English translations and the explanatory notes are the author’s own work. The Russian lines are his as well: prepared for this site as working renderings of his English, they were read through and corrected by the author on 4 September 2026.