Shabo language

Shabo
Chabu
Mikeyir
Pronunciation[tʃabu], [tsabu]
Native toEthiopia
RegionEastern South West Region
Ethnicity600 Shabo (2000)[1]
Native speakers
400 (2000)[1]
Language codes
ISO 639-3sbf
Glottologshab1252
ELPShabo
Linguasphere05-PEA-aa
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Shabo (or preferably Chabu; also called Mikeyir) is an endangered language and likely language isolate spoken by about 400 former hunter-gatherers in southwestern Ethiopia, in the eastern part of the South West Ethiopia Peoples' Region.

It was first reported to be a separate language by Lionel Bender in 1977,[2] based on data gathered by missionary Harvey Hoekstra. A grammar was published in 2015 (Kibebe 2015). Some early treatments classified it as a Nilo-Saharan language (Anbessa & Unseth 1989, Fleming 1991, Blench 2010), but more recent investigation (Kibebe 2015) found none of the grammatical features typical of Nilo-Saharan, and showed that the Nilo-Saharan vocabulary items are loans from Surmic languages (Dimmendaal to appear, Blench 2019).

  1. ^ a b Shabo at Ethnologue (18th ed., 2015) (subscription required)
  2. ^ Bender 1977, p. 13f