English ⇄ Somali,
spelled out loud.

Somali (Af-Soomaali) belongs to the Lowland East Cushitic branch of the Afroasiatic family — a cousin of Oromo, Afar, Saho and Rendille, and only a distant relative of Arabic or Amharic, which are Semitic.

Proto-Cushitic speakers are thought to have spread from the Ethiopian highlands and the Horn's interior. Somali split off as Cushitic herders moved east and south toward the Indian Ocean coast, carrying a pastoral vocabulary that is still unusually rich — dozens of words for camels alone.

Somalia adopted the Latin-based Somali alphabet (Far Soomaali) designed by Shire Jama Ahmed. It uses no p, v or z, and spells the throaty sounds with c (ʿayn), x (deep ḥ), q (uvular) and dh (retroflex d).

Somali is a pitch-accent language: inan (boy) vs. inán (girl) differ only by tone. It also has vowel harmony and a rare 'focus marker' system (baa, ayaa, waxaa) that tells you which word carries the news.

Somalia is called 'the nation of poets'. Gabay verse follows strict alliteration — every line in a poem must share the same initial consonant, sometimes for hundreds of lines.

Somali is one of the most widely spoken Cushitic languages in the world, and an official language of Somalia, Somaliland and the Somali Region of Ethiopia.

One popular folk etymology traces the name to the phrase soo maal — literally 'go and milk' — a call so common among nomadic herders that, the story goes, British soldiers marching past people milking camels and cows heard it repeated, took 'Somal' for the people's name, and 'Somali' grew from there. Linguistically the root is real: soo maal does mean 'go and milk', and the northern reading points to camel's milk while southerners gloss it as sa' maal, cow's milk. Scholars, though, more often trace the ethnonym to Samaale, the legendary common ancestor of several Somali clans — and some suggest the Arabic zāwamāl ('wealthy in livestock'). So the milk story is one cherished version, not the only one.