The Alphabet

Somalis use the Latin alphabet to read and write. This is basically the same as English, but with a few important exceptions. The alphabet is as below,

', B, T, J, X, KH, D, R, S, SH, DH, C, G, F, Q, K, L, M, N, W, H, Y, A, E, I, O, U.

The difficult letters to pronounce are C,Q,X,KH.  If you know Arabic, then C is the same as ('ayn), Q is (qaf) \, X is (ha), and KH is (kha).

A Few Words in Advance

Disclaimer: I'm not a native Somali speaker. But I grew up listening to it, and I want to deepen my knowledge of this language. At the same time I hope I can help those of you who are learning Somali(and you can help me as well), and throw in a few cultural points of interest. Since I am not a native speaker I am basing my blog posts on a few textbooks that I have studied from. You can ask me questions; if I don't know I will say so but will try to find out by asking my family or other native speakers. Probably no one will visit this site, but since there are still few places on the internet where you can find resources about the Somali language, I hope this site will be one of them. That's the goal. Wish me luck.