Course syllabus

SO1102, Somali Introduction Course

On this course you will learn some 500 Somali words and phrases through reading of elementary texts and work with exercises. You will learn basic grammatical terminology, the basic rules for Somali writing, pronunciation, word inflection as well as construction of sentences. The course also gives you a short orientation about the language situation in the Somali speaking countries as well as a brief historical background to this situation.

Term: Spring 2024, starts 15 January, ends 2 June

Credits: 7.5 ects

Study Pace: 10 working hours/week

Teacher: Morgan Nilsson

Schedule: Online lessons on most Thursdays from 18.00 to 18.45 CET.

 

Textbooks

All the reading materials needed for this course will be available online.

 

Learning outcomes

  • a basic vocabulary of some 500 words and phrases
  • basic linguistic terminology
  • the basic principles of the writing system and pronunciation of Somal
  • regular inflected forms and frequent syntactic rules
  • an acceptable pronunciation
  • the main features of the language situation of Somali and its historical background
  • use Somali dictionaries and grammars, in both printed and electronic form

 

Exams and grading

The course is divided into three parts. Each part consists of six weekly modules. Every week there are obligatory exercises and assignments that contribute points to your results on each of the three parts. You can find an good overview of your progress and your points under Grades in the left hand menu.

After each part of the course there is also a test that you will be taking online through Canvas. These tests must be taken on fixed dates - on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday - at the end of the weeks listed below. You will find the exact dates in the three Exam Moduls in Canvas.

Part 1 - Exam: after Unit 5, Retake: Three weeks later

Part 2 - Exam: after Unit 10, Retake: Three weeks later

Part 3 - Exam: after Unit 16, Retake: Five weeks after the exam in January and eleven weeks after the exam in June.

After each part you will be awarded 2.5 ects. The points on each of the tests are added to the points from the exercises and assignments. Two different grades are available: a result of 70 % is required for G (Good) and 90 % is required for VG (Very Good). The percentages are calculated on the basis of the total amount of points earned from exercises, assignments and tests.

Your result on a previous part of the course do not affect your result on a later part. The grade on Part 3 is equal to the final grade that you will receive for the whole course.

 

Somali Dictionaries

Later on you might want to buy a printed dictionary. Unfortunately, there are many quite bad dictionaries on the market.
The following are among the best choices from Somali to other languages:

There are also some larger e-dictionaries and pdf's:

If anybody knows about a good Somali-English e-dictionary or pdf, please let the rest of us know!

On this page you can find more information about further resources for Somali.

 

Somali Corpora

  • Somali Korp at the Swedish Langauge Bank with 19 million tokens of edited & published texts + Wikipedia
  • Somali WaC 2017 at project HaBiT with 79 million tokens of text from the Internet

 

Somali e-Books