Somali (Somalia) style guide

Apply these local conventions alongside the house voice and localization review. Source acknowledgments are in credits.

Address and meaning

Write clear, respectful Somali. adiga is the supplied guide's form of “you”; choose pronoun forms for the actual sentence rather than inserting the long form everywhere. Long personal pronouns can add emphasis or clarity. Keep the audience, register and terminology consistent.

A natural sentence may differ from English syntax. It must still preserve who acts, what changes and under which condition. Enabling a feature, opening it and signing into it are different results. Avoid reusing a supplier's marketing sentence unless its factual meaning fits the actual product.

Review accepted regional variants in context. Do not treat every spelling difference as a mistake or alternate between variants without a reason. Use approved terms and a Somali reference to resolve uncertainty.

Spelling and capitalization

This page covers Somali in Latin script. Preserve doubled vowels aa, ee, ii, oo and uu; they are not accidental repeated letters. The digraphs dh, kh and sh are also meaningful. Do not shorten words mechanically to fit a control.

Capitalize proper names, days, months, nationalities and language names: Soomaaliya, Soomaali, Sabti and Abriil. Capitalization of seasons and cardinal directions varies; keep the agreed convention consistent. Use sentence case for newly written headings and UI labels, while retaining the actual case of referenced controls. The broad instruction “follow English capitalization” does not mean title case everywhere.

Use verified compound spellings. A hyphen is not a general device for emphasis. Preserve word-internal punctuation where the accepted word requires it; do not copy an English compound's boundaries without checking Somali usage.

Abbreviations and grammar

Abbreviate only when the result remains recognizable. The supplied Sh. abbreviation has a final dot. Such word abbreviations differ from unit symbols such as m, kg and h, which have fixed spelling and take no abbreviation dot or plural ending.

Give an unfamiliar term's full meaning before its acronym at the first relevant occurrence. Qaramada Midoobay (UN) illustrates an expansion followed by its retained acronym. Avoid inventing a new acronym merely because the English source has one.

A plural ending such as -yo is not an algorithm for every abbreviation or noun. Determine number, gender and agreement in the complete phrase. Do not assign every loanword masculine gender from a single generalization. A count message needs its full grammatical context, including substituted values.

Preserve ownership. dukumeentiga identifies the document; replacing a possessive phrase with it can erase whose document the reader needs. Do not replace a reference to women with “people” when that changes the intended group, or assume that swapping kinship terms removes gender without changing the relationship.

Punctuation and numbers

Use full sentences where the message needs them and short phrases where the UI does. Complete sentence bullets begin with a capital and end with sentence punctuation; short labels do not need a final period. Apply punctuation rather than making every bullet lowercase and unpunctuated.

Use quotation marks for quotations. Follow house UI formatting and keep the control's actual name; a vague description of a chart area cannot replace a named command. Use iyo for “and” in prose, while preserving & inside protected names and literal tokens.

Keep values with units, as in 30 cm and 20 °C. Use −10 °C for a negative temperature; the minus is not a hyphen or an en dash. Do not treat every space in a spelled-out number as nonbreaking. Test wrapping and the actual locale's number, date and percentage output. Keep a literal version such as Nooca 4.2 unchanged where 4.2 is the product identifier.

Inclusive and interface review

A failure message must describe the state. jooji jawaab-celinta is an instruction to stop responding; it is not a suitable automatic replacement for an application that has stopped responding. Preserve tense, actor and whether a sentence reports a problem or asks the reader to act.

Use dooro for selection and guji for clicking when those are the intended actions. Follow interface actions and accessible content; do not force all input methods into one verb or every sentence into one-verb syntax. Check placeholders, count messages, literal labels and task meaning with a proficient Somali reviewer.