Oromo

Story

Oromo, known to its speakers as Afaan Oromoo, is a Cushitic language of the Afroasiatic family and has the largest number of native speakers of any language in Ethiopia, with around 33 percent of the population speaking it as a first tongue. For most of Ethiopian imperial history the language was suppressed from having a standardised writing system, forcing it underground: between 1974 and 1991 under the Mengistu regime the use of Oromo in any script was formally banned. The language's current Latin alphabet, Qubee, was adopted in a historic 1991 meeting of over a thousand Oromo scholars in the parliament building in Addis Ababa, and in the six years that followed more texts were published in Afaan Oromoo than in the preceding century. It is today one of five federal working languages of Ethiopia and is used as a lingua franca across Oromia and into northern Kenya.

At a glance

• Also known as: Afaan Oromoo
• Family: Afroasiatic
• Region: Horn of Africa
• Speakers: 50M (total speakers (l1 plus l2) estimated; approximately 45 million l1 speakers in ethiopia and kenya (2019 to 2024), plus significant l2 use across ethiopia)
• Writing system: Latin (Qubee alphabet, officially adopted 1991)
• Greeting: Akkam (how are you / hello)

Spoken in

Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia

Common questions