Samburu Language Alphabet

Unicode's CLDR, the data that teaches phones and computers each language, gives the Samburu alphabet as a b c d e g h i j k l m n o p r s t u v w y, each in capital and small form. Samburu writes its words with these 22 plain Latin letters and no accented ones, so an English keyboard can type all of these core letters. C turns up in the pair ch, and CLDR keeps v, which its list for Maasai leaves out.

The one character a plain keyboard row does not show is the apostrophe in ng’. CLDR's Samburu data writes it as the curly ’ (U+2019): Mderot ee ong’wan (Tuesday), Lapa le ong’wan (April). The symbol grid above holds the 44 letters, the curly and straight apostrophes, the quotation marks used in Kenyan print, the flag 🇰🇪, and the emoji Samburu speakers use about home: herds, milk, beads and the wildlife of the Samburu reserve.

Samburu and Maasai: closely related Maa varieties

Samburu and Maasai are closely related varieties of Maa; some sources classify Samburu as a dialect of Maa, while others treat Samburu and Maasai as separate languages. People search for the difference between Maasai and Samburu, and in speech it shows in small ways: Samburu often drops the vowel at the start of a noun that Maasai keeps, so God is Nkai in Samburu and Enkai in Maasai, and the young warriors, the morans, are lmurran rather than ilmurran.

On paper the gap is bigger. Maasai dictionaries and CLDR's Maasai data write nine vowels with the extra letters ɛ ɔ ɨ ʉ, the letter ŋ, and tone accents such as á and â. Samburu's CLDR data uses none of them: just a e i o u, ng’ with an apostrophe, the same convention as Swahili ng’ombe (cow), and no tone marks. Maa still has tone and more than five vowels in Samburu speech; everyday spelling simply leaves them unmarked, as it does in the Masai collection's examples Sopa and Enkai.

Samburu words: days of the week, months and numbers

The months in Samburu are counted. In CLDR they run Lapa le obo (January), Lapa le waare, Lapa le okuni, Lapa le ong’wan, Lapa le imet, Lapa le ile, Lapa le sapa, Lapa le isiet, Lapa le saal, Lapa le tomon (October), Lapa le tomon obo and Lapa le tomon waare (December): lapa, the moon, followed by one to ten, then ten-one and ten-two. Their short forms are Obo, Waa, Oku, Ong, Ime, Ile, Sap, Isi, Saa, Tom, Tob and Tow.

The days are built the same way, Mderot ee plus a number word: Mderot ee are (Sunday), Mderot ee kuni (Monday), Mderot ee ong’wan (Tuesday), Mderot ee inet (Wednesday), Mderot ee ile (Thursday), Mderot ee sapa (Friday) and Mderot ee kwe (Saturday). Morning and afternoon are Tesiran (a.m.) and Teipa (p.m.). For many other words CLDR's Samburu data borrows Swahili: the language itself is Kisampur, English is Kingereza, the quarters are Robo 1 to Robo 4, and BC and AD are Kabla ya Christo and Baada ya Christo.

How to type Samburu: the ng’ apostrophe, quotes and the shilling

Every Samburu letter is on an English keyboard. Many people type ng’ with the straight apostrophe ' (as in ong'wan), and that reads fine; for the curly ’ that CLDR uses, hold Alt and type 0146 on the Windows number pad, press Option+Shift+] on a Mac, or write ’ in HTML. iPhones turn ' into ’ by themselves when smart punctuation is on, and on Android and iPhone keyboards a long press on the apostrophe key offers ’.

Quotation marks follow English: “double” with ‘single’ inside, Alt+0147 and Alt+0148 for “ and ” on Windows, Option+[ and Option+Shift+[ on a Mac. The Kenyan shilling has no dedicated Unicode currency character; CLDR's Samburu locale calls it Njilingi eel Kenya, uses the three-character symbol Ksh and formats amounts as Ksh1,000.00, with a comma between thousands and a full stop for decimals. In Kenya prices are also often written with /= after a whole amount, as in Ksh 500/=.

Where the Samburu language is spoken

Samburu is spoken in northern Kenya, above all in Samburu County, around Maralal, Baragoi, Wamba and Archers Post, and in parts of neighbouring Marsabit, Isiolo and Laikipia. A 2014 phonology sketch cites 237,000 speakers in 2009, and about 330,000 people identified as Samburu in Kenya's 2019 census. The Samburu call themselves Lokop or Loikop; they herd cattle, goats and sheep, and in the drier north camels too, which they share as a way of life with their Rendille neighbours, and many also speak Swahili.

Il Chamus near Lake Baringo has a higher reported lexical similarity to Samburu (88–94%) than Maasai dialects do (77–89%); Maasai has its own collection as Masai. Teso and Turkana are more distant Eastern Nilotic relatives; Kalenjin, Pökoot and Luo are Nilotic from other branches. Swahili, Kikuyu, Oromo and the Kenya page, for the flag and the country's emoji, have collections of their own.

Samburu greetings, names and emoji

Greetings are shared with the rest of Maa. Supa is used to greet one person; Ashe or Ashe oleng means thank you or thank you very much. Many Samburu family names begin with Le-, as in the politicians Naisula Lesuuda, Moses Lenolkulal and Steve Lelegwe, while many women's given names begin with Na- or Nai-, as Naisula does.

The emoji in this collection are the ones Samburu speakers reach for about home: 🐄 🐐 🐑 🐪 for the herds that families live from, 🥛 for milk, the everyday food of herders, and 📿 for the layered bead necklaces Samburu women wear, the nearest emoji there is. 🦓 🦒 🐘 🦁 stand for Samburu National Reserve on the Ewaso Ng’iro river, known for Grevy's zebra, reticulated giraffe and the elephants studied there for decades.