Speakers
About 95 percent of Oromo speakers live in Ethiopia, mainly in Oromia Region. In Somalia, there are also some speakers of the language. In Kenya, the Ethnologue also lists 322,000 speakers of Borana and Orma, two languages closely related to Ethiopian Oromo. Within Ethiopia, Oromo is the second most widely spoken language.
Within Africa, Oromo is the language with the fourth most speakers, after Arabic (if one counts the mutually unintelligible spoken forms of Arabic as a single language and assumes the same for the varieties of Oromo), Swahili, and Hausa.
Besides first language speakers, a number of members of other ethnicities who are in contact with the Oromos speak it as a second language. For example, the Omotic-speaking Bambassi and the Nilo-Saharan-speaking Kwama in northwestern Oromia.
Read more about this topic: Oromo Language
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“The most striking aspect of linguistic competence is what we may call the ‘creativity of language,’ that is, the speaker’s ability to produce new sentences, sentences that are immediately understood by other speakers although they bear no physical resemblance to sentences which are ‘familiar.’”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“All the great speakers were bad speakers at first. Stumping it through England for seven years made Cobden a consummate debater. Stumping it through New England for twice seven trained Wendell Phillips.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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From just a shadow on a charnel-wall.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)