Me'en language

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Me'en
Spoken in:	Ethiopia
Region:	Eastern Africa
Total speakers:	56,585 (Ethnologue)
Language family:	Eastern Sudanic Surmic Southeast Surmic Me'en
Writing system:	Latin alphabet
Language codes
ISO 639-1:	none
ISO 639-2:
ISO 639-3:	`mym`
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode.

Me'en (also Mekan, Mie'en, Mieken, Meqan, Men) is a Nilo-Saharan language (Eastern Sudanic, Surmic) spoken in Ethiopia by the Me'en people. In recent years, it has been written with the Ge'ez alphabet, but in 2007 a decision was made to use the Latin alphabet. Dialects include Bodi (Podi) and Tishena (Teshina, Teshenna).

Me'en is unique among Surmic languages in that it has ejective consonants.

Reliable descriptions of some parts of the language have been produced by Hans-Georg Will, but Conti Rossini's work is much less reliable, consisting of his efforts to edit the extensive language notes of a non-linguist.

[edit] References

Conti Rossini, Carlo. (1913). "I Mekan o Suro nell'Etiopia meridionale e il loro linguaggio." Rend. R. Acc. Lincei XXII(7-10): 397-463.

Will, Hans-Georg. 1989. "Sketch of Me'en grammar." In M. Lionel Bender (ed.), Topics in Nilo-Saharan linguistics , 129-50. Nilo-Saharan, 3. Hamburg: Helmut Buske.

Will, Hans-Georg. 1998. "The Me'en verb system: Does Me'en have tenses?." In Gerrit J. Dimmendaal and Marco Last (eds.), Surmic languages and cultures , 437-58. Nilo-Saharan, 13. Cologne: R. Köppe