Suri (Tirmaga-Chai)

Abstract This chapter discusses the Tirmaga-Chai language recorded among the Suri people living in Southwest Ethiopia near the border of South Sudan. Dizi, Suri (Kacipo-Balesi), and Amharic are the languages with the most contact with Suri, especially with Amharic as the language of wider communication in Ethiopia. The Tirmaga-Chai, and Suri Woreda representatives have chosen their orthography based on a modified Roman script with the indication of grammatical tone. Tirmaga-Chai has an inventory of 22 consonants and 7 vowels which have suprasegmental features such as vowel length, gemination and tone. The language is fairly polysynthetic with most morphemes being agglutinative, although some are fusional. It predominately has SVO word order and is considered to be a nominative-accusative language.