Siltüe (áµáÂÂáÂ¥á or á¨áµáÂÂᤠá á ) is an Ethiopian Semitic language spoken in South Ethiopia. A member of the Afroasiatic family, its speakers are the Siltüe, who mainly inhabit the Siltüe Zone in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' Region. Speakers of the Wolane dialect mainly inhabit the Kokir Gedebano district of Gurage Zone, as well as the neighbouring Seden Sodo district of the Oromia Region. Some have also settled in urban areas in other parts of the country, especially Addis Ababa.
Dialects of the Siltüe language include: Azernet-Berbere, Silti, Wuriro, Ulbareg and Wolane. There are about 940,000 native Siltüe speakers (2007 census); 125,000 speakers of Wolane.
Siltüe has a fairly typical set of consonants for an Ethiopian Semitic language. There are the usual ejective consonants, alongside plain voiceless and voiced consonants and all of the consonants, except and , can be geminated, that is, lengthened.
The charts below show the phonemes of Siltüe. For the representation of Siltüe consonants, this article uses a modification of a system that is common (though not universal), among linguists who work on Ethiopian Semitic languages, but differs somewhat from the conventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet. When the IPA symbol is different, it is indicated in brackets in the charts.
Siltüe vowels differ considerably from the typical set of seven vowels in languages such as Amharic, Tigrinya and Geýez. Siltüe has the set of five short and five long vowels that are typical of the nearby Eastern Cushitic languages, which may be the origin of the Siltüe system. There is considerable allophonic variation within the short vowels, especially for a; the most frequent allophone of , , is shown in the chart. All of the short vowels may be devoiced preceding a pause.
Since at least the 1980s, Siltüe has been written in the Geýez script, originally developed for the now-extinct Geýez language and most familiar today in its use for Amharic and Tigrinya.
This orthographic system makes distinctions among only seven vowels. Some of the short-long distinctions in Siltüe are therefore not marked. In practice, this probably does not interfere with comprehension because there are relatively few minimal pairs based on vowel length. In written Siltüe, the seven Geýez vowels are mapped onto the ten Siltüe vowels as follows:
Meshesha Make Jobo reports that the use of the Siltüe language is being replaced by the use of Amharic by some speakers for some domains. He points to large political and social factors, many from the national level. He also points out smaller, local factors, such as the lack of creative genres.
https://joshuaproject.net/people_groups/19814/ET