Dialects HadiyyaSoroLeemo | Native speakers 250,000 (2007 census) | |
Language family Afro-AsiaticCushiticHighland EastHadiyya | ||
Hadiyya (sometimes Hadiyigna or Adiya) is the Afroasiatic language of the Hadiya people of Ethiopia. Most speakers live in the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and People's Region in the Hadiya Zone.
The language is a Highland East Cushitic language. The Libido language, located just to the north in the Mareko district of Gurage Zone, is very similar lexically, but has significant morphological differences. Hadiyya has a set of complex consonant phonemes consisting of a glottal stop and a sonorant: /ʔr/, /ʔj/, /ʔw/, /ʔl/.
The New Testament has been translated into Hadiyya, published by the Bible Society of Ethiopia in 1993. It was originally done using the traditional Ethiopic syllabary. A later printing used the Latin alphabet.
The Ethnologue quotes the 1998 census saying the number of speakers is 923,958, with 595,107 monolinguals. The 2007 census gives the number of speakers as a drastically reduced 253,894.