Sezo

Abstract This chapter looks into Sezo (endonym: Seez Waani), an endangered Omotic language spoken by the Seezi people living in remote villages of Begi and Qondala districts in the West Wollegga Zone, Oromia Regional State. Since Sezo is mostly used by the elder generation, and largely restricted for communication at home, the level of bilingualism in Oromo is high, especially since Oromo is used as a language for wider communication, schooling, and administration. Literacy in Sezo does not exist. The phonological inventory of Sezo includes twenty-four consonants, five vowels with contrastive length, and two level tones. Morphologically, the language is agglutinating with clear-cut morpheme boundaries in words. It is a nominative-accusative language in which the nominative is always morphologically marked, and formally differs from the accusative. Structurally, Sezo exhibits S(O)V constituent order. At phrasal and clausal level, modifiers precede heads, possessor nouns precede possessed nouns and dependent clauses precede main clauses.