Dahalo language

While the language is known primarily as "Dahalo" to linguists, the term itself is an exonym supposedly used by Aweer speakers that itself essentially means “stupid” or “worthless.” The speakers themselves refer to the language as numma guhooni. Dahalo is also called Sanye, a name shared with neighboring Waata, also spoken by former hunter-gatherers. The Waata may once have spoken a language more like Dahalo before shifting to Oromo. The Dahalo, former elephant hunters, are dispersed among Swahili and other Bantu peoples, with no villages of their own, and are bilingual in those languages. Children no longer learn the language, which would make it moribund, and it may be extinct. It is suspected that the Dahalo may have once spoken a Sandawe- or Hadza-like language, and that they retained clicks in some words when they shifted to Cushitic, because many of the words with clicks are basic vocabulary. If so, the clicks represent a substratum.