Kingdom of Yamma | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| c.15th century–1894 | |||||||
| Capital | Fofa | ||||||
| Religion | Christianity | ||||||
| Government | Monarchy | ||||||
| History | |||||||
• Established | c.15th century | ||||||
• Annexed by Ethiopian Empire | 1894 | ||||||
| |||||||
The Kingdom of Yamma, also spelled Yemma, was a small kingdom located in what is now Ethiopia. It lay in the angle formed by the Omo and the Jimma Gibe Rivers; to the west lay the Kingdom of Jimma and to the south the Kingdom of Garo. Three mountains — Mount Bor Ama, Mount Azulu, and Mount Toba — all distinguish the location of the former kingdom. It covered the area of present-day Sekoru district and Yem special woreda.
This kingdom was also known as Janjero. However, this an Amharic exonym that Yem people who inhabit the present-day site of this kingdom consider pejorative. The Yem people who inhabit the land of the former Kingdom of Yamma have been subjected to prejudice from other Ethiopians, and in the past some Yem speakers have expressed discomfort speaking their own language for fear of negative judgement.[1] The ISO 639-3 system for assigning standardized codes to languages has faced criticism for perpetuating the use of the term Janjero despite its prejudicial origin; the Yem language is coded as jnj as opposed to a mnemonic derived from the preferred name of the language.[2]
- ^ Yilma, Aklilu (August 1993). "Pilot Survey of Bilingualism in Yem". Journal of Language Survey Reports. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.470.5536.
- ^ Morey, Stephen; Post, Mark W.; Friedman, Victor A. (2013). The language codes of ISO 639: A premature, ultimately unobtainable, and possibly damaging standardization. PARADISEC RRR Conference. Archived from the original on 23 February 2016. Retrieved 10 May 2022.