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1 Introduction
The Shabo language is spoken by the Shabo people, few in number, who live near the Ethio-Sudanese border in and around the Gambela Region of southwestern Ethiopia. The Shabos closest neighbors are
the numerically superior Majang, whose culture and language are quite influential, as the two groups intermarry, trade, work and celebrate holidays together. Though the Shabo have close social ties to the
Majang people, their language is distinct. The Shabo language is as yet an unclassified language presumed to be a member of the Nilo-Saharan family, which has undertaken a vast amount of lexical
borrowing, more from Majang than from any other language Bender 1977.
1.1 Geography
The Shabo people live in what used to be the Kafa Region, between Godere and Masha, among the Majang and Shekkacho [moy] Lewis 2009. According to the current administrative divisions, most
Shabo people now live in the Sheka Zone of the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region SNNPR and the Majangir Zone of Gambela Region. Daniel 2003 also reports the existence of a Shabo
population in the Salle Noono district of Oromia.
Harvey Hoekstra conducted his unpublished research in a settlement near Gecha in the former Ilubabor Province Bender 1977, a site to the northeast of where the current study was conducted.
Bender 1975 reported that “Mekeyer” Shabo was said to be spoken in a village about a day’s walk northwest of Godere. That village could be the same as Yeri see map 1, located next to the Godere
Coffee Plantation in a wereda administrative division of the same name. In a later study, Bender 1983 stated that the Shabo inhabit a village between Godere and Masha in Ilubabor Province, in a Majang
area. This would probably be closer to where Hoekstra conducted his research. Unseth 1984 describes the Shabo as living with Majang on the upper Godere River 10–12 miles north of Godere and towards
the town of Gecha in the area where Mocha Shekkacho is spoken. He worked with a young man then living in the town of Meti. Judging from the locations of the above mentioned research, it seems that
within the past 30 years the Shabo may have occupied land farther to the north and east, in addition to their current area.
Map 1. Shabo language area
Source: map was created with AtlasGIS v4.0 and geographical data from World Database WDB.
1.2 People and language
Matthias Brenzinger estimates that there are only 400–500 speakers of Shabo out of an ethnic population of 600 or more Lewis 2009. There is no mention of the Shabo in the 1994 Population and Housing
Census of Ethiopia. The Shabo people call themselves “Sabu” and their language “Sabuyye.” They do not like the terms “Shako” and “Mekeyer,” names for the Shabo used by the Shekkacho and Majang,
respectively.
The Shabo make their living from resources found in the forest, mainly depending on hunting and honey-gathering, since neither farming nor raising livestock is common in their society. They also seek
out employment offered by nearby coffee plantations and other opportunities that nearby towns provide. A few of them do make their living from subsistence farming, whereas the neighboring Majang raise the
bulk of their own food by farming Stauder 1971. © SIL International
One tradition about the Shabo’s origin is that their ancestors were mother tongue speakers of Majang, but that their present language has changed a great deal since those times Bender 1975. Based
on the little data available to him at the time, including a wordlist gathered by Harvey Hoekstra, Bender 1977 tentatively classified Shabo together with Majang as a member of the Surmic branch of Nilo-
Saharan. According to his lexicostatistical analysis, it has 22 commonality with Majang, no more than 11 with any other Surmic language, and up to 16 with Omotic languages. Shabo appears to have a
great deal of lexical borrowing in its history, and Surmic is the grouping with which it has the highest number of lexical matches. Other past efforts to classify Shabo, based on very little data, included the
idea that they might be related to a Murle [mur] offshoot Bender 1975. In addition to his above- mentioned work, Bender 1994 presented some data on Shabo verb morphology in his grammatical
comparison of the Koman speech varieties and Gumuz [guk].
Stauder 1970:109 mentions “Mikair” clans among the Majang, said to have come from the Sheko [she] a neighboring Omotic group. Shabo does have some grammatical features, such as pronouns, that
are more similar to Omotic languages like Ganza [gza]. In spite of this, it is almost certainly a Nilo- Saharan language, according to Bender 1983. This is based on 40 of 176 words resembling Nilo-
Saharan.
Unseth 1984 presented linguistic data showing that Shabo is indeed a separate language, not a variety of Majang. He collected 70 words from an informant who spoke Shabo as a child but
subsequently moved to a Majang area and spoke that language. A Majang accent may therefore be present in the wordlist items, affecting sounds like s, p and f, which are interchangeable in Majang.
Unseth’s data shows that Shabo contains glottalized stops, which separate it from Majang, and bilabial implosives, which distinguish it from Omotic languages. The highest number of cognates with any
language was found to be 20–29 with Majang, based on a conservative to a more liberal comparison count. As stated above, there has apparently been a large amount of borrowing in Shabo’s history.
Though it seems linguistically closer to the Surmic language group than to the Koman group, it does contain a very high number of Koman cognates for a speech variety with no Koman neighbors.
1.3 Other research
