Top photo credit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ethiopia_adm_location_map.svg
Zay is one of several languages spoken in Ethiopia.
- It is spoken by the Zay people who live on Gelilla and the other five islands and shores of Lake Zway in the southern part of the country.
Zay is part of the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family of languages.
- More specifically, it belongs to the Ethiopic group of languages.
- Examples of other Ethiopic languages are Tigrinya, Amharic, Harari, and Mesqan.
- Other Semitic languages include Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic.
According to UNESCO, there were approximately 1000 speakers of the language left in 2004.
- This is a significant decline from Ethnologue’s statistics which lists 4900 speakers as of 1994.
- Many speakers also speak Oromo and Amharic, along with other languages.
Some key features of Zay:
- Zay is an unwritten language.
- Zay uses SOV (subject-object-verb) word order.
- Zay vocabulary and grammar has been greatly affected by the Oromo language.
References
Polyglot in Progress 
