Chara people

The Chara also known as the Tsara are a people group of Ethiopia. They form a part of the Gimira peoples of Ethiopia and live in the Kaffa Highlands,[1] and the Debub Omo area.

Their three main villages are Geba a meša, Buna Anta, and Kumba, Ethiopia and they practise subsistence farming and hold to a syncretic religion of Orthodox Christianity with tribal practices.[2][3] The Chara people speak their own Chara language[4] a member of the Omotic Language group,[5][6] which is linguistically similar to Mela[7] and the numerically much larger Wolaytta[8][9] both of which many Chara also speak.[10] (See Ethiopian language map).

The number of Chara have been decimated due to slavery and war and are estimated to number between 16,500[11] and 6,984 (1994 census)[12] people.

References

  1. Chara at hornof Africa.org.
  2. Chara In Ethiopia.
  3. Yilma, Aklilu 2002 Sociolinguistic survey report on the Chara language of Ethiopia.
  4. CHara in Ethiopia at Joshua Project.
  5. Ethiopian languages.
  6. Switch-reference and Omotic-Cushitic language contact in Southwest Ethiopia, Journal of Language Contact 5 (2012) 80.
  7. Sociolinguistic Survey Report of the Chara, Dime, Melo, and Nayi Languages of Ethiopia.
  8. ethnologue Africa.
  9. Yilma, Aklilu (1995), "Some notes on the Chara language: Sound system and noun morphology", S.L.L.E. linguistic reports 32: 2-12.
  10. Chara language at Ethnologue (17th ed., 2013)
  11. Chara at peoplegroups.org
  12. Ethiopia at Country Guides and Profiles.


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