Saho Alphabet

CLDR lists a core set of 22 Latin letters for Saho: 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. The fuller Eritrean orthography also uses additional letters, digraphs and a diaeresis. P, V and Z are not part of the basic alphabet that CLDR, Unicode's locale database, records for Saho, and neither is J, although J does turn up in a borrowed word, as the day names below show.

The order is the unusual part. The Saho alphabet 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, with the vowels at fixed points along it: a first, e fifth, i ninth, o fifteenth, u nineteenth. It is the same order Afar uses, and it is the order this page's grid follows.

Length is shown by doubling. A long vowel is written with two vowel letters and a long consonant with two consonant letters: in the CLDR month names, Liiqen has a long ii, Kaxxa Garablu a doubled xx and Ciggilta Kudo a doubled gg. Some words use a diaeresis to mark pitch accent.

What C, Q and X mean in Saho

Saho, like Afar, has sounds that English does not, and its spelling hands them to Latin letters it would otherwise not need. C is the voiced pharyngeal /ʕ/ (Arabic ʿayn). X is the voiceless pharyngeal /ħ/ (Arabic ḥ), and Dh is the retroflex stop /ɖ/. Q is the velar ejective /kʼ/ in northern varieties.

The day names that CLDR gives for Saho make q easy to see. Monday to Thursday are Sani, Salus, Rabuq and Camus, Arabic-derived words for the second, third, fourth and fifth day, and Rabuq has q, which in Eritrean Saho stands for a k-like ejective, not for ʿayn: that sound is written c. Friday, Jumqata, is an Arabic-derived name (from jumʿa); it is also the word that brings in the J that the basic alphabet leaves out.

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

How to type the Saho alphabet

The 22 core letters fit an ordinary Latin keyboard, but a full Saho spelling may use digraphs and a diaeresis. Write c, q and x where Saho spelling has them, double a vowel for a long vowel, and double a consonant where the word has a long one.

Saho punctuation is the ordinary Latin set: full stops and commas, the question mark ? and the exclamation mark !, and quotation marks, given here as curly quotes “ ”. The Eritrean nakfa has no Unicode sign of its own; CLDR's Saho locale places Nfk before the amount, as in Nfk 100.00.

Saho has at times been written in the Ethiopic (Ge'ez) script and in Arabic letters, but in Eritrea, where children can do their first years of school in their mother tongue, it is taught and printed in the Latin alphabet, the same system Eritrea uses for Afar.

Where the Saho language is spoken

Saho is the language of the Saho people, one of the nine ethnic groups Eritrea officially recognises. They live along the eastern escarpment, where the highlands of southern Eritrea drop toward the Red Sea coast, and on the coastal plain below. CLDR estimates about 230,000 speakers in Eritrea; other estimates differ. Across the border in Ethiopia's Tigray Region, the Irob people speak a Saho dialect, so the Ethiopian flag 🇪🇹 belongs on this page too.

Most Saho are Muslim, while the Irob are mostly Christian, which is why one language is written about in both mosque and church contexts. Saho is a Cushitic language, and its closest relative is Afar, close enough that linguists often group the two as Saho-Afar; in CLDR's Saho data Afar is called Qafar and Eritrea Eretria. Somali and Oromo are more distant Cushitic cousins, and Bilen is the other Cushitic language of Eritrea. Tigrinya, Tigre and Arabic, Saho's big neighbours, are Semitic.

For those languages see the Afar, Somali, Oromo, Tigrinya, Tigre and Arabic collections; for the flag, currency and emoji of the country, see Eritrea, and for Tigray's country, Ethiopia.

Saho emoji: goats, cattle and the escarpment

Many Saho families have long lived from their herds of goats 🐐 and cattle 🐄, with camels 🐪 too, moving with the seasons between the mountain ⛰️ slopes of the escarpment and the warm coastal lowlands as the rains shift from one side of the range to the other. Those are the emoji people reach for when they write about Saho country, alongside the flag of Eritrea 🇪🇷.