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Language code: so

Technical information about ISO 639 language code so

Documentation

The table below provides technical details for the Somali language, designated by the so code from the ISO 639-1 standard.

Code

so

Name

Official

Somali

Native

Soomaaliga

Family
Cushitic
Text direction

Left-to-Right

Language varieties
Northern SomaliBenadir SomaliMaay
Related languages
OromoAfarSahoRendille
Key facts
Uses a specially adapted Latin alphabet adopted in 1972Traditional oral poetry such as gabay and geeraar is central to cultural identityHas a rich system of noun cases marked mainly by tone and suffixesThe basic clause order is Subject–Object–VerbModern vocabulary includes many loanwords from Arabic, Italian and English
Sample phrase

Iska warran, sidee tahay?

Character encodings

UTF-8, UTF-16, UTF-32

Supported in Localizely

Somali belongs to the Afro-Asiatic language family, more specifically to the Cushitic subgroup. It is one of the official languages of Somalia and Somaliland, and is also used in some parts of Djibouti, Kenya and Ethiopia. It is written using the Latin script (Somali alphabet). It is estimated that there are around 23 million speakers worldwide.

Language presence globally

Speakers

Somalia

12M

Ethiopia

7.7M

Kenya

2.6M

Djibouti

552K

*The graph shows a rough estimate of Somali speakers in countries where it is an official or minority language.

Related locale codes

so-DJ – Somali (Djibouti)

so-ET – Somali (Ethiopia)

so-KE – Somali (Kenya)

so-SO – Somali (Somalia)

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