| Maay | |
|---|---|
| Maay Maay, af Maay | |
| Spoken in | Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya significant communities in North America, and Yemen. |
| Native speakers | 1,5-2 million native and at least 200,000 second language speakers. (date missing) |
| Language family | |
| Official status | |
| Official language in | Somalia |
| Regulated by | No official regulation |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | ymm |
Maay Maay (also known as Af Maay, Afmaay, Af-May arti, Af-May, Af-Maymay, Rahanween, Rahanweyn) is a member of the East Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family and is written using the Latin alphabet. It is spoken mostly in Somalia and adjacent parts of Ethiopia and Kenya. Its speakers are known as Sab Somalis. The center of the language is around Baidoa.
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Maay Maay exhibits significant amounts of epenthesis, inserting central or high-central vowels to break up consonant clusters. Vowel length is contrastive; minimal pairs such as bur 'flour' and buur 'mountain' are attested.
Maay Maay is fairly agglutinative. It has complex verb forms, inflecting at least for tense/aspect and person/number of both subject and object. There is also a prefix indicating negation. In addition, verbs exhibit derivational morphology, including a causative and an applicative. Nominal morphology includes a definiteness suffix, whose form depends on the gender of the head noun, and possessive suffixes.
Maay Maay exhbits SVO and SOV word orders, apparently in fairly free variation. When the object is postverbal, the prefix maay appears on the verb. Within the noun phrase, the head noun is generally initial. Possessors, adjectives and some strong quantifiers follow the head noun. Numerals and the indefinite quantifier precede the head noun.