Shabo

Shabo is a language isolate spoken in Ethiopia, by about 400 people. Glottolog rates it moribund.

Shabo · 7.6°N 35.2°E

An isolate: no relationship to any other known language has been demonstrated.

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, 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 (Blench 2019).

From Wikipedia · Shabo language · CC BY-SA 4.0

Words in Shabo

Meaning	Word	Romanization
person	ufa*
name	iNkaye*
eye	se*
ear	kiti*
tooth	kaw*
tongue	handa*
hand	ifu*
blood	yɛrom
bone	Emenan*
skin	akuS*
knee	hotu*
breast	duh*
liver	Cukuma*
water	wɔ
fire	Cuwa*
sun	oha*
star	marion*
stone	mana*
tree	kona*
leaf	Cam*
night	dip*
dog	kan*
fish	CaNa*
louse	nEna*
one	iNki*
two	bap*
I	tiN*
you	kuku*
we	an*
drink	who*