Notes on the morphology of Marka (Af-Ashraaf)

This paper provides an overview of selected aspects of the nominal, pronominal,
and verbal morphology of the Marka (Merca) dialect of Af-Ashraaf, a Cushitic lan-
guage variety spoken primarily in the city of Merca in southern Somalia, as well as
by several diaspora communities around the world, and in particular, in the United
States. Marka is interesting to us for a variety of reasons, not the least of which
is the general dearth of descriptive work on the language in comparison to two
of its closest relatives, Somali and Maay. While many details of the structure of
Somali are fairly well established (e.g., Bell 1953; Saeed 1999), and those of Maay
are the subject of several recent works (e.g., Paster 2010; 2018), the various ways in
which Marka relates to and/or differs from these languages, are yet poorly under-
stood. Our goal in this paper is to begin to remedy this situation, beginning with a
comparison of selected morphological characteristics across the three languages.