Notes on the Structure of Galab

There is very little published material of the Galab (Geleba, Dasenech, Dathanaik, or Marille) language which is spoken around the northern shore of Lake Rudolf in the Gamu Gofa Province of south-western Ethiopia and in the adjacent areas of northern Kenya. Several attempts to determine the linguistic position of this language have been made, nevertheless no generally accepted classification exists as yet. This is, of course, due to lack of adequate descriptive data. I would therefore like to present in this paper a preliminary analysis of my own field data on Galab in the hope that it will at least provide a somewhat sounder basis for future work on the classification of the language.