Coffee, indigenous to Oromo lands in Ethiopia, is an essential cultural and spiritual element in people’s lives. Oromo who resettled in the United States have adapted ancient coffee traditions in indigenous, Christian, and Muslim contexts. This in-depth ethnographic study looks at buna for several generations of Muslim Oromo. The authors explore interpersonal and ritual ways that the women communicate support for one another and promote harmony in their families and community through this ancient tradition. They highlight previous ethnographic studies of Oromo groups (1962-1998) to place this urban coffee gathering in a broader historical, political, economic, and social context. The coffee gathering provides important opportunities for women to communicate with Allah, saints, and each other. Interactions during buna involve greetings, honoring, respecting the elders, praying, sharing stories, and sustenance.

Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Historical Issues in Sociolinguistics/Social Issues in Historical Linguistics (1995)

No abstract

This is a study of the locational structures of Oromo. A range of syntactic constructions types is considered within a single synchronic grammaticalization schema. Speaker choices of particular structures within discourse are also identified and explored. The primary data are drawn from the Guji dialect, with reference to data from other dialects that are attested in the literature. Most of the morphological marking that is found across these locationals is consistent in all Oromo speech communities, and, although there is some variation in some particular lexemes across the dialects, the inventories of locational lexemes are interlocking and nearly entirely overlapping.

This paper identifies a general phonic pattern of indexing on referential, spatiotemporal, and logical structures in Oromo. Final –n(V) marking across these different grammatical forms correlates with assumed accessibility of referents and of other information in discourse across a range of syntactic and semantic elements. The primary data for this study are from a spontaneous Guji narrative. Previous research on the form of referring expressions and the cognitive status of their referents in other Oromo dialects is extended through the consideration of the nominal constructions in this narrative. Furthermore, by the examination of other constructions, this –n(V) indexical is identified as a general pragmeme that functions to mark expressions for accessible referents and information on a range of forms across a discourse in Oromo.