Lexical and Phonological Variation among Affan Oromo Language Speakers of Kemisie Society

Abstract

The study examines the lexical and phonological variations of Kemisie Oromo with respect to the locations of the society. To do this, the researcher applied a descriptive research design and conducted a study in Oromia Zone Amhara region. To make it manageable, the researcher used Kemisie teachers training college as a sample area and selected 120 representative students from different Woredas of Kemisie Zone, and provided 335 word lists in Amharic and English language to convert it to Affan Oromo. Additionally, three teachers who teach Affan Oromo in the college were selected purposively for sociolinguistic interview.  Analysis was made qualitatively by eliciting the collected data and by adopting “Comparative Method” approach. Furthermore, the study classify the Kemisie Oromo varieties based on the Woreda of the Zone into three varieties of local dialects such as Bati local dialect, Jile Tumuga local dialect, and Other local dialects that is Dewa Chefa, Dewi Harwa, Artuma Fursi and Kemisie administrative town. Lexical variation was the most frequently linguistic variation which presented among the categorized Woreda. For this, different Wordas in Kemisie Zone use different names to call the same thing. In addition, phonological variation presented by using alternative sounds /phonemes/, by omitting one sound /phoneme/ in the existing word, and by using metathesis.