Sidama Alphabet (Sidaamu Afoo)

Sidama, Sidaamu Afoo in its own spelling and long called Sidamo in English, is written in the Latin alphabet. Its letters are the ordinary A–Z in the ordinary order, each in a capital and a small form, so a school chart, a dictionary and this page's grid all run A, B, C … Z. There are no accents, no diaeresis and no special letters: everything on this page can be typed on a plain English keyboard.

What Sidaama adds are a handful of double letters: ch, dh, ny, ph, sh, ts and zh, each one sound written with two ordinary letters. They have no Unicode characters of their own and need none; you type c then h, d then h, and so on. P and V are uncommon and turn up mostly in loanwords and names.

The last piece is the apostrophe ', which in Sidaama is not punctuation but a letter of sorts: it marks a glottal stop, the short catch in the throat heard in the middle of English uh-oh.

What C, Q, X, DH and PH sound like in Sidaama

Like its Cushitic neighbour Oromo, Sidaama has ejective consonants, sounds made with a short pop of air pushed up from the closed throat, and its spelling hands them Latin letters English uses differently. Q is an ejective k, X is an ejective t, C is an ejective ch and PH an ejective p. So in Sidaama 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 rather than pushing it out. NY is the sound of Spanish ñ, CH, SH and J are as in English church, shop and jam, Y is the y of yes and G is always hard.

Sidaama has five vowels, a e i o u, read as in Italian or Swahili rather than by their English names: e as in bed, i as in machine, o as in or, u as in rule.

Double letters, long vowels and the apostrophe

Length is written, not guessed. A long vowel is written twice, aa ee ii oo uu, and a long consonant is written twice too. The language's own name shows both habits: Sidaama and Sidaamu Afoo carry long aa and oo, and the New Year festival Fichee-Chambalaalla has a long ee, a long aa and a doubled ll. A doubled letter is never a typo, and dropping one can turn a word into a different one.

The glottal stop is typed with the apostrophe key '. Phones and word processors often turn it into the curly ’, and some writers and fonts use the modifier letter apostrophe ʼ, U+02BC, the character Unicode intends for an apostrophe that is part of a word, because it keeps the word together when text is searched or broken across lines. All three are on this page; pick one and use it consistently.

For the curly ’ 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. Sidaama punctuation is otherwise the ordinary Latin set: full stops, commas, the question mark ?, the exclamation mark ! and curly quotes “ ” around quotations. The Ethiopian birr has no Unicode currency sign; it is written Br, or ብር in Ethiopic letters.

Where Sidaamu Afoo is spoken

Sidama is the language of the Sidama people of southern Ethiopia 🇪🇹, on the green highlands east of Lake Hawassa. CLDR, Unicode's locale database, estimates about 4.1 million speakers, all in Ethiopia; other estimates differ. Since 2020 most of them live in the Sidama Region, which became Ethiopia's tenth regional state after a referendum in November 2019, with Hawassa as its capital.

Before the early 1990s Sidama was mostly written, when it was written at all, in the Ethiopic (Ge'ez) script used for Amharic. When Ethiopia's regions began teaching in their own languages, Sidaama took a Latin spelling close to Oromo's Qubee, and it is now the alphabet of Sidaamu Afoo school textbooks, local radio, Bible translations and social media.

Sidama belongs to the Highland East Cushitic branch, with Gedeo, Hadiyya and Kambaata as its closest relatives. Oromo, Somali and Afar are more distant Cushitic cousins with Latin alphabets of their own, while Amharic, Ethiopia's working language, uses the Ethiopic script; each has its own collection, and the flag, currency and emoji of the country are in the Ethiopia collection.

Sidama emoji: coffee and Fichee-Chambalaalla

Sidama coffee ☕ is one of the world's best-known coffee origins: beans 🫘 grown by smallholders in the Sidama highlands are sold everywhere under the names Sidamo and Sidama. Coffee grows there alongside enset, the false banana whose starchy pseudostem, leaf sheaths and corm are used for staple foods in the region. There is no emoji for a Sidama or Sidama Region flag, since emoji flags exist only for countries and a few regions, so people use 🇪🇹 together with ☕.

Fichee-Chambalaalla is the Sidama New Year, whose date astrologers determine by observing the stars and the moon. Families gather to share buurisame, a dish of enset and butter, and people sing and dance in the open. UNESCO added the festival to its list of the intangible cultural heritage of humanity in 2015.