Chaha or Cheha (in Chaha and Amharic: ቸሃ čehā or čexā) is a Gurage language spoken in central Ethiopia, mainly within the Gurage Zone in the Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region. It is also spoken by Gurage settlers in Ethiopian cities, especially Addis Ababa. Chaha is known to many phonologists and morphologists for its very complex morphophonology. Speakers According to Ethnologue, the dialects of SBG (Sebat Bet Gurage) are Chaha (čäxa), Ezha (äža), Gumer (or Gwemare, gʷämarä), Gura, Gyeto (or Gyeta, gʸäta), and Muher (or Mwahr, mʷäxǝr). However, some of these are sometimes considered languages in their own right. In particular, Muher diverges so much from the other dialects that it is not necessarily even treated as a member of the Western Gurage group to which SBG belongs. This article focuses on the Chaha dialect, which has been studied more than the others. Unless otherwise indicated, all examples are Chaha. Sounds and orthography Consonants and vowels SBG has a fairly typical set of phonemes for an Ethiopian Semitic language. There is the usual set of ejective consonants as well as plain voiceless and voiced consonants. However, the Chaha language also has a larger set of palatalized and labialized consonants than most other Ethiopian Semitic languages. Besides the typical seven vowels of these languages, SBG has open-mid front () and back vowels (). Some of the dialects have both short and long vowel phonemes, and some have nasalized vowels. The charts below show the phones of the Chaha dialect; exactly how many phonemes there are is a matter of controversy because of the complexity of SBG morphophonology. For the representation of SBG sounds, this article uses a modification of a system that is common (though not universal) among linguists who work on Ethiopian Semitic languages, but it differs somewhat from the conventions of the International Phonetic Alphabet. When the IPA symbol is different, it is indicated in brackets in the charts. Morphophonology In addition to the complexity in verb morphology characteristic of all Semitic languages, SBG exhibits another level of complexity because of the intricate relationship between the set of consonants in the root of a verb and how they are realized in a particular form of that verb or a noun derived from that verb. For example, the verb meaning 'open' has a root consisting of the consonants {kft} (as it does in most other Ethiopian Semitic languages). In