Chali

Chali is a Berber-Cushitic dialect continuum spoken in the River of Shala, Ethiopia. It is an mainly-suffixing agglutinative language, with some slight Semitic influence.

Consonants
Chali's consonantal inventory shares most of the Omotic and Cushitic languages, with the lack of phonemic /p/ and labialized stops and nasals. Voiceless stops are aspirated at the beginning of a word, and have no audible release at the end of words e.g. táat [ˈtʰaːt̚˦] (folk).

Vowels
When in unstressed positions, /a/ reduces to [ə], /e/ reduces to [i] and /o/ reduces to [u].

Tone indication
When needed, the conventions for marking tone in written Chali are as follows:


 * acute accent - high tone /˦/
 * grave accent - low tone /˨/
 * circumflex - falling tone /˦˨/

Tones on long vowels are marked on the first vowel symbol.

Pitch accent
In Chali, the tone-bearing unit is the mora rather than the vowel of the syllable.


 * 1) A long vowel or a diphthong consists of two morae and can bear two tones. Each mora is defined as being of high or low tone.
 * 2) Only one high tone occurs per word and this must be on the final or penultimate mora.
 * 3) Particles do not have a high tone. (These include prepositions, clitic pronouns for subject and object, impersonal subject pronouns and focus markers.)

There are therefore three possible "accentual patterns" in word roots.

The tone accent in Chali may be classified as a pitch accent. It is similar to that of Oromo and Somali.

Rules of tone
Phonetically there are three tones: high, low and falling. Rules:


 * 1) On a long vowel, a sequence of high-low /˦˨/ is realized as a falling tone.
 * 2) On a long vowel, a sequence of low-high /˨˦/ is realized as high-high /˦˦/. (Occasionally it is a rising tone.)

Stress-tone connection
Stress is connected with tone. The high tone has strong stress; the falling tone has less stress and the low tone has no stress.

Syllable structure
The Chali syllable structure is relatively simple, with a maximum of C(r)V(C), where initial Cr is only used in loanwords e.g. traag (truck). To avoid such initial consonant clusters, an epenthetic /a/ or prosthetic /i/ (sometimes toned) may be used (táraag). All consonants may be geminated, except /t/, /k/, the labialized consonants and the fricatives. /t/, /k/ and /m/ never appear at the end of a coda, instead, /d/, /g/ and /n/ are used as replacements.

Orthography
Chali is written with the Latin Kotaax or Arabic Wotaa script. The Kotaax script uses all letters of the Latin alphabet, except p and v. It also uses a phonemic system, meaning that it uses a one to one grapheme orthography. Long vowels are shown by doubling the vowel. Labialized consonants are made by putting w after the letter (KW, GW, QW, NGW). Diphthongs are represented using Y or W as the second element (AY, AW, EY, EW, OY, and OW), and long versions of them are shown with the first vowel doubled.

Consonants
The names and order of the consonants are based on the Arabic alphabet.