Omotic

The Omotic languages are a group of closely related languages spoken mainly in southwestern Ethiopia, around the Omo River, with a few reaching the Blue Nile highlands of southeastern Sudan. They fall into four branches: Damotic, or North Omotic, Dizoid, Mao and the southern Aroid group.

Most linguists treat Omotic as the most divergent branch of the Afroasiatic family, though its unity is disputed and some place Mao and Aroid outside Afroasiatic.

The languages are agglutinative, and many, such as Bench, have complex tonal systems. Some were written in the Ge'ez script, which gained its vocalized form around 330 in the kingdom of Aksum; early nineteenth-century European scholars first described the northern tongues under the name Gonga and classed them with Cushitic.