Bench (Bencnon, Shenon or Mernon, formerly called Gimira ) is a Northern Omotic language of the "Gimojan" subgroup, spoken by about 174,000 people (in 1998) in the Bench Maji Zone of the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples Region, in southern Ethiopia, around the towns of Mizan Teferi and Shewa Gimira. In a 2006 dissertation, Christian Rapold described three varieties of Bench (Benchnon, Shenon, and Mernon) as "...mutually intelligible...varieties of one and the same language". Bench is the ancestral language of the Bench people. In unusual variance from most of the other languages in Africa, Bench has retroflex consonant phonemes. The language is also noteworthy in that it has six phonemic tones, one of only a handful of languages in the world that have this many. Bench has a whistled form used primarily by male speakers, which permits communication over greater distances than spoken Bench. The whistle can be created using the lips or made from a hollow created with both hands. Additionally, this form of the language may be communicated via the 5-stringed krar. Phonology The phonemic vowels of Bench are . There are six phonemic tones: five level tones (numbered 1 to 5 in the literature, with 1 being the lowest) and one rising tone 23 . The top tone is sometimes realized as a high rising 45 . On the vowel o, they are The consonants are: All of these can occur palatalized, but only before , suggesting an alternate analysis of a sixth phonemic vowel . Labialized consonants are reported for and , but their phonemic status is unclear; they only occur after . For the phoneme the realizations of and [f] are in free variation; has the allophone before back vowels. The syllable structure is (C)V(C)(C)(C) + tone or (C) N (C), where C represents any consonant, V any vowel, N any nasal, and brackets an optional element. CC clusters consist of a continuant followed by a plosive, fricative, or affricate; in CCC clusters, the first consonant must be one of or , the second either or a voiceless fricative, and the third or . Grammar Nouns Plurals may optionally be formed by adding the suffix ; however, these are rarely used except with definite nouns. E.g.: "her relatives"; "all the people". Pronouns Personal pronouns The word goes slightly beyond being a reflexive pronoun; it can mark any third person that refers to the subject of