Fedwet – an endangered argot of Gurage women

Résumé En

The presentation deals with the main linguistic features of a secret linguistic variety mainly used by Gurage women, the so-called mʷɨyät, i.e. followers of a former local religious tradition, which flourished until the beginning of the 20th century. Currently, it is only remembered by a few old women and thus at the verge of disappearing.The cultural and sociolinguistic role of the Fedwet variety is discussed in few publications, notably Shack (1966: 133–135); Gabreyesus (1991: 140–145); Sɨntaläm (2012), and particularly Etaferahu (2021), but not much has been known about its linguistic features, except a selective wordlist given in Leslau (1964). Etaferahu (2019) contains a more detailed linguistic description of the Fedwet.In the presentation, we will present an in-depth description of the Fedwet variety including its lexical, phonological, morphological, and syntactic peculiarities. The data were gathered by elicitation, recording of free texts, and interviews.It will be shown that the Fedwet variety is an argot based on Chaha (Ethiosemitic, Sebat Bet Gurage) which has been manipulated through several processes, including regular morphophonological changes, a number of lexical substitutions, and semantic extensions and changes.