Ongamo language

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Ongamo
Ngasa,  ?
Spoken in: Tanzania
Total speakers: extinct
Language family: Nilo-Saharan
 Eastern Saharan
  Eastern Nilotic
   Lotuxo-Teso
    Lotuxo-Maa
     Maa
      Ongamo
Language codes
ISO 639-1: none
ISO 639-2: ssa
ISO 639-3: omg

Ongamo (or Ngasa) is an endangered or extinct Eastern Nilotic language of Tanzania. It is related to the Maa languages, but it is more distantly related to them than the Maa languages are to each other. Ongamo has 60% of lexical similarity with Maasai, 59% with Samburu, 58% with Camus. Many of its speakers have shifted to Chagga, a dominant regional Bantu language.

[edit] References

  • Sommer, Gabriele {1992) 'A survey on language death in Africa', in Brenzinger, Matthias (ed.) Language Death: Factual and Theoretical Explorations with Special Reference to East Africa. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 301–417.


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