Sociolinguistic Survey of the Shabo of Ethiopia
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DigitalResources Electronic Survey Report 2015-019 Sociolinguistic Survey of the Shabo of Ethiopia Linda Jordan, Hussein Mohammed, and Jillian Netzley 1 Sociolinguistic Survey of the Shabo of Ethiopia Linda Jordan, Hussein Mohammed, and Jillian Netzley SIL International® 2015 SIL Electronic Survey Report 2015-019, December 2015 © 2015 SIL International® All rights reserved Abstract The Shabo language [sbf] of southwestern Ethiopia has been viewed in the past as an unlikely candidate for language development. The aim of this survey, conducted in November 2004, was to either prove or disprove that assessment. It was found that the Shabo are a very small and highly bilingual group, and their attitude toward the Majang people and language [mpe] is overwhelmingly positive. As the Shabo’s preferred second language, Majang is spoken at a high level of fluency. This study suggests that the Shabo are adequately bilingual in the sense that they are likely to benefit from literature and educational materials developed in the Majang language. [This survey report written some time ago deserves to be made available even at this late date. Conditions were such that it was not published when originally written. The reader is cautioned that more recent research may be available. Historical data is quite valuable as it provides a basis for a longitudinal analysis and helps us understand both the trajectory and pace of change as compared with more recent studies.—Editor] Contents 1 Introduction 1.1 Geography 1.2 People and language 1.3 Other research 2 Goals of the research 3 Methodology 3.1 Procedures 3.1.1 Group and individual interviews 3.1.2 Bilingual proficiency self-evaluation 3.1.3 Wordlists 3.2 Data sources 3.2.1 Group and individual interviews 3.2.2 Bilingual proficiency self-evaluation 3.2.3 Wordlists 3.3 Data analysis 3.3.1 Group and individual interviews 3.3.2 Bilingual proficiency self-evaluation 3.3.3 Wordlists 4 Results 4.1 Group and individual interviews 4.1.1 Multilingualism 4.1.2 Language use 4.1.3 Language attitudes 4.1.4 Attitudes to dialects 4.1.5 Social interaction patterns 4.1.6 Language vitality 4.1.7 Language development 4.2 Bilingual proficiency self-evaluation 4.3 Wordlists 5 Evaluation of data 5.1 Group and individual interviews 5.2 Bilingual proficiency self-evaluation 5.3 Wordlists 6 Conclusions and recommendations Appendix A Appendix B Appendix C References iii 1 Introduction The Shabo language is spoken by the Shabo people, few in number, who live near the Ethio-Sudanese border in and around the Gambela Region of southwestern Ethiopia. The Shabo's closest neighbors are the numerically superior Majang, whose culture and language are quite influential, as the two groups intermarry, trade, work and celebrate holidays together. Though the Shabo have close social ties to the Majang people, their language is distinct. The Shabo language is as yet an unclassified language presumed to be a member of the Nilo-Saharan family, which has undertaken a vast amount of lexical borrowing, more from Majang than from any other language (Bender 1977). 1.1 Geography The Shabo people live in what used to be the Kafa Region, between Godere and Masha, among the Majang and Shekkacho [moy] (Lewis 2009). According to the current administrative divisions, most Shabo people now live in the Sheka Zone of the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region (SNNPR) and the Majangir Zone of Gambela Region. Daniel (2003) also reports the existence of a Shabo population in the Salle Noono district of Oromia. Harvey Hoekstra conducted his unpublished research in a settlement near Gecha in the former Ilubabor Province (Bender 1977), a site to the northeast of where the current study was conducted. Bender (1975) reported that “Mekeyer” (Shabo) was said to be spoken in a village about a day’s walk northwest of Godere. That village could be the same as Yeri (see map 1), located next to the Godere Coffee Plantation in a wereda (administrative division) of the same name. In a later study, Bender (1983) stated that the Shabo inhabit a village between Godere and Masha in Ilubabor Province, in a Majang area. This would probably be closer to where Hoekstra conducted his research. Unseth (1984) describes the Shabo as living with Majang on the upper Godere River (10–12 miles north of Godere) and towards the town of Gecha in the area where Mocha (Shekkacho) is spoken. He worked with a young man then living in the town of Meti. Judging from the locations of the above mentioned research, it seems that within the past 30 years the Shabo may have occupied land farther to the north and east, in addition to their current area. 1 2 Map 1. Shabo language area © SIL International Source: map was created with AtlasGIS v4.0 and geographical data from World Database (WDB). 1.2 People and language Matthias Brenzinger estimates that there are only 400–500 speakers of Shabo out of an ethnic population of 600 or more (Lewis 2009). There is no mention of the Shabo in the 1994 Population and Housing Census of Ethiopia. The Shabo people call themselves “Sabu” and their language “Sabuyye.” They do not like the terms “Shako” and “Mekeyer,” names for the Shabo used by the Shekkacho and Majang, respectively. The Shabo make their living from resources found in the forest, mainly depending on hunting and honey-gathering, since neither farming nor raising livestock is common in their society. They also seek out employment offered by nearby coffee plantations and other opportunities that nearby towns provide. A few of them do make their living from subsistence farming, whereas the neighboring Majang raise the bulk of their own food by farming (Stauder 1971). 3 One tradition about the Shabo’s origin is that their ancestors were mother tongue speakers of Majang, but that their present language has changed a great deal since those times (Bender 1975). Based on the little data available to him at the time, including a wordlist gathered by Harvey Hoekstra, Bender (1977) tentatively classified Shabo together with Majang as a member of the Surmic branch of Nilo- Saharan. According to his lexicostatistical analysis, it has 22% commonality with Majang, no more than 11% with any other Surmic language, and up to 16% with Omotic languages. Shabo appears to have a great deal of lexical borrowing in its history, and Surmic is the grouping with which it has the highest number of lexical matches. Other past efforts to classify Shabo, based on very little data, included the idea that they might be related to a Murle [mur] offshoot (Bender 1975). In addition to his above- mentioned work, Bender (1994) presented some data on Shabo verb morphology in his grammatical comparison of the Koman speech varieties and Gumuz [guk]. Stauder (1970:109) mentions “Mikair” clans among the Majang, said to have come from the Sheko [she] (a neighboring Omotic group). Shabo does have some grammatical features, such as pronouns, that are more similar to Omotic languages like Ganza [gza]. In spite of this, it is almost certainly a Nilo- Saharan language, according to Bender (1983). This is based on 40% of 176 words resembling Nilo- Saharan. Unseth (1984) presented linguistic data showing that Shabo is indeed a separate language, not a variety of Majang. He collected 70 words from an informant who spoke Shabo as a child but subsequently moved to a Majang area and spoke that language. A Majang accent may therefore be present in the wordlist items, affecting sounds like s, p and f, which are interchangeable in Majang. Unseth’s data shows that Shabo contains glottalized stops, which separate it from Majang, and bilabial implosives, which distinguish it from Omotic languages. The highest number of cognates with any language was found to be 20–29% with Majang, based on a conservative to a more liberal comparison count. As stated above, there has apparently been a large amount of borrowing in Shabo’s history. Though it seems linguistically closer to the Surmic language group than to the Koman group, it does contain a very high number of Koman cognates for a speech variety with no Koman neighbors. 1.3 Other research Anbessa Teferra has conducted several studies of the Shabo language, including work on its classification with Unseth (1989). They consider it to be Nilo-Saharan but do not go into any detail on its position within that family. Anbessa has also worked on Shabo’s grammar (1991) and phonology (1995). Harold Fleming (1991) presented data on the preliminary classification of Shabo as Nilo-Saharan, considering it to be most closely related to Koman. This is based on the fact that the wordlists reveal a significant number of Koman words after the loanwords from Majang and Shekkacho are removed. Fleming (2002) also presented some data on Shabo verb morphology in his exploration of whether Shabo belongs to Nilo-Saharan or to a new African phylum. He believes that it is likely to be a major branch of its own within Nilo-Saharan. Ehret (1995) is not convinced that Shabo can be classified as either Nilo-Saharan or Afro-Asiatic. He considers the words of Koman origin to be early loans. After identifying and removing these items along with the loanwords from Majang and Shekkacho, he found little evidence to support the Nilo-Saharan classification assigned by others and therefore regards Shabo as an isolate. Daniel Aberra has also collected data on Shabo, studying its phonology (1998), pronouns (2003), morphology (2001, 2004) and typology (2005). Schnoebelen (2009), like Ehret, believes that Shabo is best treated as an isolate.