The Position of Gafat in Ethiopic

Gafat is an Ethiopic language which was spoken some 150 years ago in the province of Gafat, southwest of Gojjam, northwest of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. According to the testimony of the latest travellers, the language is no longer spoken in that province. The inhabitants of Gafat now speak Amharic, the national language of Ethiopia. The only document which allows us to gain an insight into the structure of the language is the translation of the Song of Solomon from Amharic into Gafat made by a priest of Gafat at the end of the 18th century for the traveller James Bruce. The manuscript is now at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Another available document of this language is a collection of words made by Beke, On the languages and dialects of Abyssinia and the countries to the South, published in the Proceedings of the Philological Society 2.99–107 (1845), but in fact all the words are already Amharic provided with the Gafat ending - iš (see §2.5). According to Beke the language was sinking into oblivion.