Aari

Aari (Aramado) is an Omotic language of the Afro-Asiatic family, spoken by around 150,000 people in the South Omo Zone of southern Ethiopia, primarily in the Aari woreda. The Aari are one of the larger Omotic-speaking groups of Ethiopia's Cushitic-Omotic-rich southern lowlands. Linguistically, Aari is part of the Aroid sub-branch of Omotic alongside Hamer-Banna and Dime — Omotic itself is the most divergent branch of Afro-Asiatic, with significant debate among Africanists about whether Omotic should even be classified within Afro-Asiatic at all (Bender, Theil, and others propose Omotic as a separate language family). Aari preserves typically Omotic features including SOV word order, ejective consonants, and elaborate verb morphology with unusual person-marking patterns.