Pluricentric features of spoken Somali that resist the standardization of written Somali

A native Somali speaker who says aaddo for sister is recognizedas a Djiboutian Somali, since the word is used only in Djibouti.Other words used for sister have distinctive territorial usagefollowing the national boundaries of Djibouti, Ethiopia,Somaliland, Somalia, and the north-eastern regions of Kenya.Huunno for sister is used in the Somali Regional State in Ethiopiaand the western regions of Somaliland. Walaal is used inSomaliland, while walaalle/waalle is used towards the borderwith eastern Federal Somalia. Baayo is used east-central regionsof Federal Somalia, and abbaayo/abbaaye is used from Banaadirup to the border with Kenya. Hence, geographical variations forthe meaning sister include Aaddo, Huunno, Walaal, Walaalle,Waalle, Baayo, Abbaayo, and Abbaaye. This paper aims todetermine how much this regional variation of the spokenlanguage persists in the written form. It does so by examining themeaning sister within the seven million tagged words of theSomali Corpus. The countries in which the authors grew up willthen be taken into account to assess to what extent an author'sorigin influences the word they use for sister in their writings,and the fictional characters in the stories and their origins will becommented.