Dialects/Varieties

It is not clear to what extent Kayla, Qwara, and Qimant have been dialects of the same Western Agaw language, or were languages distinct from each other.

Consonants

Continuants can be geminated word-medially.

Vowels

Phonotactics

The maximum syllable structure in Qimant is CVC, which implies that consonant clusters are only allowed word-medially.^[8] In loanwords from Amharic there may also be consonant-clusters within a syllable. Vowel clusters are not allowed.

Phonological processes

Consonant clusters with more than two consonants are broken up by inserting the epenthetic vowel /ɨ/. Other phonological processes are nasal assimilation and devoicing of /ɡ/ at word boundaries.^[9]

Prosody

The prosodic features of Qimant have not been studied yet.

Morphology

The personal marking system distinguishes between first person singular and plural, second person singular, polite, and plural, and third person masculine, feminine and plural. On the verb, all inflectional categories are marked by suffixes. Zelealem (2003, p. 192) identifies three different aspect forms in Qimant: Perfective, Imperfective and Progressive. Like in other Central Cushitic languages, the numbers one to nine go back to an ancient quinary system, where the suffix /-ta/ added to the numbers two to four results in the numbers six to nine ^{[clarification needed]} (2-4 are three numbers, 6-9 are four numbers).^[10]

Syntax

The basic constituent order in Qimant, like in all other Afro-Asiatic languages of Ethiopia, is SOV. The presence of a case marking system allows for other, more marked orders. In the noun phrase the head noun follows its modifiers. Numbers, however, can also follow the head noun. All kind of subordinate clauses precede the main verb of the sentence.^[11]