Oromo Alphabet (Qubee)

Oromo, Afaan Oromoo in its own spelling, is written in Qubee, the Latin alphabet as Oromo uses it. Its single letters are the 26 letters of A–Z in their usual order, each in capital and small form, which is also the set CLDR, Unicode's locale database, records for Oromo. There are no accents, no diaeresis and no special letters, so everything on this page can be typed on an ordinary English keyboard.

On top of the single letters come the qubee dachaa, the "double letters": ch, dh, ny, ph and sh, each one sound written with two ordinary letters. School charts list them after Z. They have no Unicode characters of their own and need none: you type c then h, d then h, and so on.

The last piece is the hudhaa, the apostrophe ' that marks a glottal stop, the catch in the throat in the middle of English uh-oh. It appears in everyday words such as ja'a (six), ta'e (became) and bu'aa (result). P, V and Z are mostly found in loanwords and names.

Oromo alphabet pronunciation: C, Q, X, DH and PH

Oromo has ejective consonants, sounds made with a short pop of air pushed up from the closed throat, and Qubee gives them Latin letters that were otherwise spare. Q is an ejective k, as in Qubee itself; X is an ejective t, as in xiqqaa (small); C is an ejective ch; and PH is an ejective p, rare outside loanwords. So in Oromo q is never the q of queen, x is never ks and c is never k or s.

DH is an implosive d, said while drawing the air slightly inwards, as in dhugaa (truth) and kudhan (ten). NY is the sound of Spanish ñ, as in nyaata (food). CH, SH and J sound as in English church, shop and jam, Y is the y of yes, G is always hard, and R is tapped or rolled.

Oromo has five vowels, a e i o u, each short or long. They are read as in Italian or Swahili, never as English vowel names: e as in bed, i as in machine, o as in or, u as in rule.

Long vowels, double consonants and the hudhaa '

Length is part of Oromo spelling and changes meaning. A long vowel is written twice, aa ee ii oo uu: the language's own name, Afaan Oromoo, has two of them. A long, doubled consonant is also written twice: badaa means bad, baddaa means highland, and saddeet (eight) and xiqqaa (small) carry doubled dd and qq. So a doubled letter in Oromo is never a typo, and dropping one can turn a word into a different one.

The hudhaa ' sits between two letters where the voice stops for an instant: ja'a (six), ga'e (arrived), bal'aa (wide). On a computer it is just the apostrophe key. Phones and word processors often turn it into the curly ’, and the modifier letter apostrophe ʼ, U+02BC, is the character Unicode intends for an apostrophe that is a letter, which keeps the word together when text is searched or broken across lines. All three are on this page; whichever you use, use it the same way throughout.

How to type Afaan Oromo on a keyboard or phone

Any Latin keyboard types Afaan Oromo, so no Oromo keyboard has to be installed: write the double letters as two keystrokes, double vowels and consonants where the word has them, and press the apostrophe key ' for the hudhaa. Afaan Oromo keyboard apps exist, but they are an optional extra, not a requirement.

For the curly apostrophe ’ press Option+Shift+] on a Mac or Alt+0146 on the Windows number pad; in HTML it is ’, the straight one ' and the letter apostrophe ʼ ʼ. Oromo punctuation is the ordinary Latin set: full stops, commas, the question mark ? and the exclamation mark !, with curly quotes “ ” around quotations.

Neither the Ethiopian birr nor the Kenyan or Somali shilling has a Unicode currency sign: the birr is written Br, or ብር in Ethiopic letters, the Kenyan shilling KSh and the Somali shilling by its code, SOS.

From Ge'ez letters to Qubee: where Oromo is spoken

Oromo was written long before Qubee. The first complete Oromo Bible, translated by Onesimos Nesib with the help of Aster Ganno and printed in 1899, used the Ethiopic (Ge'ez) script; Muslim Oromo wrote the language in Arabic letters, and in the 1950s Sheikh Bakri Sapalo devised a script of his own. Oromo writers worked on a Latin alphabet from the 1970s, and in 1991 Qubee was adopted as the official way to write the language. It is now the alphabet of Oromo schools, newspapers, radio, websites and social media.

Afaan Oromoo is the largest of the Cushitic languages. CLDR estimates about 38 million speakers, almost all of them in Ethiopia 🇪🇹, where it is the language of the Oromia Region, the largest of the country's regions, and is spoken around and in the capital, Finfinnee in Oromo. Kenya 🇰🇪 has about 270,000 speakers by the same estimate, mostly Borana in the north, and Somalia 🇸🇴 roughly 55,000. Other estimates are higher.

Oromo's Cushitic relatives Somali, Afar, Saho and Sidamo are written in Latin letters too; Amharic and Tigrinya, Ethiopia's big Semitic languages, use the Ethiopic script, and Wolaytta and Swahili are other neighbours with collections of their own. For the flags, currencies and emoji of the countries, see Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia.

Oromo emoji: the odaa tree, coffee and Irreechaa

There is no emoji for an Oromo flag: emoji flags exist only for countries and a few regions, so people searching for an Oromo flag emoji usually reach for 🇪🇹 or for the tree 🌳. The tree is the odaa, the sycamore fig under which the assemblies of the Gadaa system, the Oromo system of age-grades and elected leaders that UNESCO has listed as intangible heritage, traditionally met, and it stands on the flag of the Oromia Region. That is the "oromo tree emoji".

Coffee ☕, buna, grows wild in the forests of southwestern Oromia and in gardens across the region and is served at home with ceremony. At Irreechaa, the Oromo thanksgiving at the end of the rainy season, in late September or early October, crowds gather at Hora Harsadi, a crater lake in Bishoftu, carrying fresh grass 🌿 and yellow flowers 🌼 and dipping them in the water.