This topic of academic work touches on a lot of different resources but all of which come back to being academic studies. These are mostly not published or are freely available outside of being published. This means that it is a lot of articles in academic journals or masters or doctoral work, either theses or dissertations. In addition to basic children’s books, this was one of my first easily available resources.
When I first came to Ethiopia, I did not know where exactly I would be living or which language I would be learning. That didn’t give a lot of room for language resources. Also, most places online recommend Amharic due to historical and political reasons. So, besides a basic Amharic phrasebook, I didn’t bring anything. I ended up living fairly far away from Addis Ababa. This meant I didn’t have access to any bookstores there. Besides the lessons and book from the organization I was with, I was on my own.
If you were not aware it can take several months for mail to get to rural Ethiopia. Even with my post office box being in a large town, it took about seven months for the newspaper reader and grammar book I ordered to arrive. This left me with the resources I was able to find online. This list has evolved over time, but some of my early finds, such as the AAU Repository are still valid.
My Favorite
Some of these academic resources, such as Baye Yimam’s, “The Phrase Structure of Ethiopian Oromo” (1986) are well researched documents (SOAS for linguistics in this case). Others may be less easy to read but still have quality afaan Oromoo material to practice with. Baye’s was one of the first that I found and I still appreciate the dissertation. It covers many topics that later books have discussed but it was my first good linguistic look at afaan Oromoo.