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 Oriental Orthodox Christianity with tribal practices.[2] The Chara people speak their own Chara language a member of the Omotic Language group,[3][4] which is linguistically similar to Mela[5] and the numerically much larger Wolaytta[6][7] both of which many Chara also speak.[8] (See Ethiopian language map).

The number of Chara have been decimated due to slavery and war and are estimated to number between 16,500 and 6,984 (1994 census)[9] people.

References

  1. ↑ Chara Archived 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine at hornof Africa.org.
  2. ↑ Yilma, Aklilu 2002 Sociolinguistic survey report on the Chara language of Ethiopia.
  3. ↑ Ethiopian languages.
  4. ↑ Switch-reference and Omotic-Cushitic language contact in Southwest Ethiopia, Journal of Language Contact 5 (2012) 80.
  5. ↑ Sociolinguistic Survey Report of the Chara, Dime, Melo, and Nayi Languages of Ethiopia Archived 2014-10-06 at the Wayback Machine.
  6. ↑ ethnologue Africa.
  7. ↑ Yilma, Aklilu (1995), "Some notes on the Chara language: Sound system and noun morphology", S.L.L.E. linguistic reports 32: 2-12.
  8. ↑ Chara language at Ethnologue (17th ed., 2013)
  9. ↑ Ethiopia at Country Guides and Profiles.



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