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| Gafat | |
|---|---|
| Native to | Ethiopia |
| Ethnicity | Gafat |
| Extinct | (date missing) |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | gft |
gft.html | |
| Glottolog | gafa1240 |
The Gafat language is an extinct Ethio-Semitic language once spoken by the Gafat people along the Blue Nile in Ethiopia, and later, speakers pushed south of Gojjam in what is now East Welega Zone. [1] [2] Gafat was related to the Harari language and Eastern Gurage languages. [3] The records of this language are extremely sparse. There is a translation of the Song of Songs written in the 17th or 18th Century held at the Bodleian Library.
Charles Tilstone Beke collected a word list in the early 1840s with difficulty from the few who knew the language, having found that "the rising generation seem to be altogether ignorant of it; and those grown-up persons who profess to speak it are anything but familiar with it." [4] The most recent accounts of this language are the reports of Wolf Leslau, who visited the region in 1947 and after considerable work was able to find a total of four people who could still speak the language. Edward Ullendorff, in his brief exposition on Gafat, concludes that as of the time of his writing, "one may ... expect that it has now virtually breathed its last." [5]
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Wolf Leslau was a scholar of Semitic languages and one of the foremost authorities on Semitic languages of Ethiopia.
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The Gafat people are an extinct ethnic group that once inhabited present day western Ethiopia. They spoke the Gafat language, an extinct South Ethiopic grouping within the Semitic subfamily of the Afroasiatic languages and closely related to Harari and Eastern Gurage languages. According to Alleqa Taye, in the year 1922 Gafat was only spoken privately in Gojjam due to the Amhara designating them outcasts.