Somali Alphabet

Somali, Af Soomaali in its own spelling, has been written officially in Latin letters since 21 October 1972. The alphabet has 21 consonants, b t j x kh d r s sh dh c g f q k l m n w h y, and 5 vowels, a e i o u; that is the answer to the school question xarfaha af Soomaaliga waa imisa? (how many letters does Somali have?). Many charts add the glottal stop ' as a letter of its own, and with long vowels counted separately you will also see 10 vowels.

The order is not A–Z. Somali lists its consonants first, B, T, J, X, KH, D, R, S, SH, DH, C, G, F, Q, K, L, M, N, W, H, Y, and its vowels A, E, I, O, U last, an order that closely follows the Arabic alphabet. Osmanya, the older Somali script, uses the same order, which is why the grid above can line the two up letter for letter.

There are no accents or special letters at all. KH, SH and DH are single sounds written with two ordinary letters, and P, V and Z are left out because Somali does not have those sounds; they appear only in foreign names. Everything on this page apart from Osmanya can be typed on an ordinary English keyboard.

Somali alphabet pronunciation: C, X, Q and DH

The letters that surprise English readers are the ones the 1972 alphabet gave to sounds English lacks. X is the breathy throat h of Arabic ḥ (ح), as in Xamar, the Somali name of Mogadishu, and Maxamed (Mohamed). C is the Arabic ʿayn (ع), a voiced squeeze deep in the throat, as in Cali (Ali) and Cabdi (Abdi). So in Somali x is never ks and c is never k or s.

Q is said further back than k, at the uvula, as in qalin (pen). DH is a d made with the tongue curled back, and between vowels it often sounds close to an r, as in dhul (land). KH is the rough kh of Arabic and Scottish loch, found mostly in words from Arabic. SH is as in shop, J as in jam, G is always hard and R is rolled.

The five vowels are read as in Italian, a e i o u, never with English letter names. Somali also uses pitch accent to tell some words apart, but the spelling does not mark it.

Long vowels, double consonants and the apostrophe '

Length is spelt out. A long vowel is written twice, aa ee ii oo uu, as in the language's own name Soomaali and in haa (yes); a doubled consonant is a long one, as in saddex (three) and siddeed (eight). A doubled letter in Somali is never a typo.

The apostrophe ' marks the glottal stop, the catch in English uh-oh, in words such as lo' (cattle) and su'aal (question). On a keyboard it is the apostrophe key. Phones often turn it into the curly ’, and some typesetters prefer the modifier letter apostrophe ʼ, U+02BC, which Unicode treats as part of the word. All three are on this page; pick one and use it consistently.

How to type Somali, and Osmanya, on a keyboard or phone

No Somali keyboard is needed for the Latin alphabet: every letter is on an English keyboard, the digraphs are two keystrokes and the glottal stop is the apostrophe key. On phones, add Somali as a keyboard language if you want autocorrect and suggestions in Somali; the keys stay the same. For the curly ’ press Option+Shift+] on a Mac or Alt+0146 on the Windows number pad; in HTML it is ’.

Osmanya is a different matter. Its letters sit in Unicode's Osmanya block, U+10480–U+104AF, outside the Basic Multilingual Plane, so they need a font that covers them, such as Google's free Noto Sans Osmanya. To use them without a dedicated keyboard app, copy them from the grid; in HTML, 𐒈 is 𐒈. Osmanya is written left to right like Latin, and has its own digits 𐒠 𐒡 𐒢 … 𐒩.

The old Somali alphabet: Osmanya and other scripts

Before 1972 Somali was written mostly in Arabic letters, in religious and business writing, and several Somalis invented scripts of their own. The best known is Osmanya, Far Soomaali, created around 1920–1922 by Cismaan Yuusuf Keenadiid (Osman Yusuf Kenadid), a son of the Sultan of Hobyo. It has 30 letters, including separate signs for the long vowels aa, ee and oo, and it was used for correspondence and record-keeping in the following decades. Two later inventions, the Borama (Gadabuursi) script of the 1930s and the Kaddare script of the 1950s, are also part of this story.

When the government chose the Latin script in 1972, a nationwide literacy campaign followed in 1973–1975, and Latin-letter Somali became the language of schools, newspapers and government. Osmanya is now a heritage script, which is what people mean when they search for the old or ancient Somali letters.

Where Somali is spoken

Somali is a Cushitic language of the Afroasiatic family. CLDR estimates about 18.6 million speakers: about 10 million in Somalia 🇸🇴, where it is the official language alongside Arabic, about 7 million in Ethiopia 🇪🇹, mainly in the Somali Region, about 760,000 in Kenya 🇰🇪, mostly in the north-east, and about 400,000 in Djibouti 🇩🇯. Large diaspora communities live in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 (about 140,000 by the same estimate), Canada 🇨🇦 (about 60,000), the United States, above all Minnesota, and Scandinavia. Other estimates are higher.

Somali's closest written relatives are Afar and Oromo, also Cushitic and also written in Latin letters without accents; Arabic, Amharic and Swahili are its big neighbours, each with a collection of its own. For the flag, the star ⭐ and the emoji people send for Somalia, see Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Djibouti.