Editing Shabo language (section)

{{Short description|Language of southwestern Ethiopia}}
{{Infobox language
| name             = Shabo
| altname          = Chabu
| nativename       = ''Mikeyir''
| pronunciation    = {{IPA|[tʃabu]}}, {{IPA|[tsabu]}}
| states           = [[Ethiopia]]
| region           = Eastern [[South West Ethiopia Peoples' Region|South West Region]]
| ethnicity        = 600 [[Shabo people|Shabo]] (2000)<ref name=e18/>
| speakers         = 400
| date             = 2000
| ref              = e18
| familycolor      = isolate
| family           = [[Language isolate]]
| iso3             = sbf
| glotto           = shab1252
| glottorefname    = Shabo
| lingua           = 05-PEA-aa
| notice           = IPA
}}

'''<span lang="Ba" dir="ltr">Shabo</span>''' (or preferably ''Chabu''; also called '''Mikeyir''') is an [[endangered language]] and likely [[language isolate]] spoken by about 400 former hunter-gatherers in southwestern [[Ethiopia]], in the eastern part of the [[South West Ethiopia Peoples' Region]].

It was first reported to be a separate language by [[Lionel Bender (linguist)|Lionel Bender]] in 1977,<ref>Bender 1977, p. 13f</ref> based on data gathered by missionary Harvey Hoekstra. A grammar was published in 2015 (Kibebe 2015). Some early treatments classified it as a [[Nilo-Saharan language]] (Anbessa & Unseth 1989, Fleming 1991, [[Roger Blench|Blench]] 2010), but more recent investigation (Kibebe 2015) found none of the grammatical features typical of Nilo-Saharan, and showed that the Nilo-Saharan vocabulary items are loans from [[Surmic languages]] (Dimmendaal to appear, Blench 2019).