🇸🇴 Somali #58 Most Spoken Language (30M speakers)

Somali is one of the best-known Cushitic languages, with a strong tradition of oral literature and careful sound patterns.
It has contrastive vowel length (short vs long vowels can change meaning),
and it uses digraphs to represent key consonants in writing.
Tone and pitch patterns exist in speech, but the standard spelling does not mark them, so reading depends on context.

• Vowel length matters: a vs aa can signal different words or forms.
• Common digraphs: dh, kh, sh are part of everyday spelling.
• Apostrophe (ʼ): used for a glottal stop, typically not at the start of a word.
• Simple alphabet design: no accents or special marks, which makes typing easy.

• Typical order: Subject + Object + Verb (SOV) is common in neutral statements.
• Gender: nouns are commonly masculine or feminine.
• Case roles: form and stress patterns can change depending on a noun’s role in a sentence.
• Definiteness: Somali uses markers and patterns to show whether something is known or new in the conversation.

Somali has several major varieties. The most widely used standard is based largely on Northern Somali (often associated with the Maxaa/Maxaa Tiri continuum).
Other important varieties include Maay, spoken in parts of southern Somalia, which has notable differences in sound and vocabulary.