So here comes a language that people familiar with more obscure Semitic languages might know. So as assumed, most Semitic languages are fairly widely spoken unless it’s name is Hobyot [hoːbjoːt], Bathari [batˤħari], Argobba [argobːa], or anything that can be very generally called “Aramaic”…and then there’s Harari. Harari isn’t necessarily restricted in speech community size — it has around 120,000 speakers — it’s simply restricted in a geographic sense. Harari is from, well, Harar; a city found in north eastern Ethiopia on the end of the Ahmar mountain range. And well, this is the only place you’ll actually find large amounts of Harari-speaking populations in Ethiopia.
While there is obviously a Harari diaspora in both Addis Ababa and outside of Ethiopia, Harari seems to only have a low transmission rate in these situations (from personal knowledge, I could be wrong). Yet nonetheless, Harari is not an endangered language in relatively any way, shape, or form. It actually has a fairly extensive literary history — I actually own a manuscript that is most likely in Harari. So the language is not necessarily obscure (if you study Semitic languages that is), or threatened in any way unless you’re speaking of the religious sphere where it’s lost the battle against Arabic for the most part. Harari is a fairly interesting outside of its sociolinguistics situation as well.
It’s closest relatives around found relatively distant from it, Zay being located in and around one lake in central Ethiopia, and both Silt’e and Wolane being located in Southern Ethiopia near the Outer South branch of Ethiopian Semitic. Interestingly enough, despite the geographic distance, there is far less lexical difference. Harari relatively has some where around 70% lexical correspondence with Zay and somewhere around 60% with Silt’e (there is no data for lexical similarity with Wolane). It is also fairly closely related to Amharic, being that it is a member of the Transversal branch of South Ethiopian Semitic.
Grammatically, Harari is not too unique. Phonologically, it is more interesting though. Although most Transversal South Ethiosemitic languages don’t exhibit the throaty phonemes Semitic is oh-so wonderfully stereotyped for, Harari does. Harari exhibits the phonemes /ɣ/, /χ/, and /ʔ/ — which are a bit odd for the branch it belongs too. While Zay and the Azarnat dialect of Silt’e also do exhibit /ʔ/, it is still fairly rare for this branch of Ethiosemitic. So Harari does have some surprises up its selves besides the fact that it’s only really spoken as an every day language in one city in eastern Ethiopia.
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