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The Most Similar Languages to Somali

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Somali is a Cushitic language spoken primarily in Somalia and parts of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Djibouti. According to the eLinguistics.net analysis using specific software modules to assess linguistic relationships, the five languages most similar to Zulu are Oromo, Afar, Hadiyya, Sidamo, and Hebrew.

  1. Oromo (51.9)
    Oromo is predominantly spoken in Ethiopia. It shares a strong linguistic affinity with Somali, particularly in its vocabulary and grammatical structure. The mutual intelligibility between Oromo and Somali is limited, but the similarities in linguistic roots make Oromo one of the closest relatives of Somali.
  2. Afar (41.0)
    Afar is another Cushitic language spoken by people in Djibouti, Eritrea, and Ethiopia. The two languages share a considerable amount of vocabulary and grammatical features. The geographical proximity of the Afar-speaking regions to Somalia has facilitated this linguistic relationship, contributing to the languages’ similarities.
  3. Hadiyya (30.0)
    Hadiyya is spoken in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Region of Ethiopia. Although it is more distantly related to Somali compared to Oromo and Afar, it still shares several Cushitic features. Hadiyya and Somali both exhibit agglutinative morphology, where words are formed through the addition of affixes.
  4. Sidamo (25.2)
    Spoken by the Sidama people in Ethiopia, Sidamo has many similarities to the Somali language. They shares some linguistic features with Somali. The similarities are rooted in their common Cushitic heritage, though the differences in lexicon and phonetics make direct communication between Somali and Sidamo speakers challenging.
  5. Hebrew (17.6)
    Hebrew, while not a Cushitic language, is included in this list due to its Afroasiatic roots. As a Semitic language, Hebrew is more distantly related to Somali but shares a broader linguistic ancestry within the Afroasiatic family. The similarities are more abstract, found in the historical development of language structures and certain syntactical features.

(to be considered for the list, the language must be spoken by at least one million people)

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