Afar Alphabet

In Djibouti and Ethiopia, Afar (Qafar af) is written with 22 letters of the Latin alphabet: five vowels, a e i o u, and seventeen consonants, b t s c k x d q r f g l m n w h y, each in capital and small form. Eritrean Afar uses a different Latin spelling for three sounds: x for /ħ/, c for /ʕ/ and the digraph dh for /ɖ/. J, P, V and Z are not part of the Djibouti/Ethiopia alphabet, and it uses no accents or apostrophe-letters. Everything you need is on an ordinary English or French keyboard.

What makes the Afar alphabet unusual is its order. It does not run A B C D but A B T S E C K X I D Q R F G O L M N U W H Y, and the five vowels sit at fixed points along it: a first, e fifth, i ninth, o fifteenth, u nineteenth, with the consonants in between. That is the order this page's grid follows, the order CLDR, Unicode's locale database, records for Afar.

Length is written by doubling. A long vowel is two vowel letters and a long, doubled consonant is two consonant letters, as the CLDR month and day names show: Liiqen and Kamiisi have long ii, Etleeni a long ee, Kaxxa Garablu a doubled xx and Ciggilta a doubled gg. Everyday spelling marks no stress or pitch.

What C, Q and X mean in the Djibouti/Ethiopia spelling of Afar

Afar has sounds English does not, and instead of adding new letters its spelling gives them to Latin letters it had no other use for. C is the breathy, voiceless sound made deep in the throat, the ḥ of Arabic ح. Q is its voiced partner, the squeezed throat sound of Arabic ع (ʿayn). X is a d said with the tip of the tongue curled back, the retroflex ḍ.

The Arabic loanwords among the CLDR day names make the system easy to see. Acaada (Sunday) is Arabic al-ʾAḥad, with c for ḥ; Arbaqa (Wednesday) and Gumqata (Friday) are Arabic arbaʿa and jumʿa, with q for ʿayn. And Qafar itself, the people's name for themselves, starts with that throat sound, which English simply drops when it says Afar.

So q in Afar never sounds like the q of queen, x never sounds like ks, and c never sounds like k or s. Ximoli (November), Caxah Alsa (May) and Qasa Dirri (June) use all three.

How to type the Afar alphabet

Because every Afar letter is a plain Latin letter, nothing special is needed: any English, French or other Latin keyboard on a phone or computer types the whole alphabet. Write c, q and x where Afar spelling has them, double vowels for long vowels, and double consonants where the word has them.

Afar punctuation is the ordinary Latin set: full stops, commas, the question mark ? and the exclamation mark !, with curly quotes “ ” around quotations. None of the three currencies of the Afar countries has a Unicode sign of its own: the Ethiopian birr is written Br, the Djiboutian franc Fdj and the Eritrean nakfa Nfk, the abbreviations CLDR uses in its Afar locales.

Afar has also been written in the Ethiopic (Ge'ez) script and in Arabic letters, but the Latin alphabet, worked out by Afar writers in the 1970s, is used across the region, though Eritrean Afar spells three sounds differently.

Where the Afar language is spoken

Afar is the language of the Afar people of the Horn of Africa, who live in the hot lowlands where Ethiopia, Djibouti and Eritrea meet: the Danakil Depression, the Awash valley and the Red Sea coast. CLDR estimates about 2.3 million speakers in all: roughly 1.7 million in Ethiopia, most of them in the Afar Region, about 420,000 in Djibouti, where Afar and Somali are the two big languages of everyday life while French and Arabic are official, and about 230,000 in Eritrea's Southern Red Sea region. Other estimates differ.

In Afar the three countries are Otobbia, Yabuuti and Eretria. Afar is a Cushitic language, and its closest relative is Saho of Eritrea, close enough that linguists often speak of Saho-Afar. Somali and Oromo are more distant Cushitic cousins; Amharic, Tigrinya and Tigre are more distant relatives in the Semitic branch of the wider Afroasiatic family.

For those languages see the Saho, Somali, Oromo, Amharic, Tigrinya, Tigre, Arabic and French collections; for the flags, currencies and emoji of the countries, see Ethiopia, Djibouti and Eritrea.

Afar emoji: camels, salt and volcanoes

Many Afar families are herders of camels 🐪 and goats 🐐 across one of the hottest places on Earth. In the Danakil Depression of Ethiopia's Afar Region, men still cut slabs of salt 🧂 from the salt flats and load them on camel caravans bound for the highlands, and the volcano Erta Ale 🌋 is famous for its lava lake. Over the border in Djibouti, the salt lake Lake Assal lies about 155 metres below sea level, the lowest point in Africa. The desert 🏜️, the caravan and the salt are the emoji people reach for when they write about Afar country.