Lowland East Cushitic languages
| Lowland East Cushitic | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution | Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya |
| Linguistic classification | Afro-Asiatic
|
| Subdivisions | |
Lowland East Cushitic[1] comprises two dozen diverse languages of the Cushitic family within Afro-Asiatic. They are spoken mainly in Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia, and by Cushitic groups in northern Kenya.
Lowland East Cushitic is often grouped with Highland East Cushitic (the Sidamic languages), Dullay, and Yaaku as East Cushitic, but that group is not well defined and considered dubious.
The most prominent Lowland East Cushitic languages are Oromo, with about 21 million speakers in Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, and Somali (spoken by ethnic Somalis in Somalia, Somaliland, Ethiopia, Yemen, Djibouti, and Kenya) with about 15 million speakers, as well as Afar (in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti) with about 1.5 million.
Robert Hetzron has suggested that the Rift languages (South Cushitic) are a part of Lowland East Cushitic,[2] and Kießling & Mous (2003) have suggested more specifically that they be linked to a Southern Lowland branch, together with Oromo, Somali, and Yaaku–Dullay.
The vocabulary of the mixed register of Mbugu (Ma'a) may also be East Cushitic (Tosco 2002), though the grammatical basis and the other register are Bantu.
Unclassified within the Lowland languages are Konsoid, Girirra, and perhaps the endangered Boon.
Savà and Tosco (2003) believe Ongota is an East Cushitic language with a Nilo-Saharan substratum—that is, that Ongota speakers shifted to East Cushitic from an earlier Nilo-Saharan language, traces of which still remain. However, Fleming (2006) considers it to be an independent branch of Afrasiatic.
See also
References
- Roland Kießling & Maarten Mous. 2003. The Lexical Reconstruction of West-Rift Southern Cushitic. Cushitic Language Studies Volume 21
- Tosco, Mauro. 2000. 'Cushitic Overview.' Journal of Ethiopian Studies 33(2):87-121.
- Savà, Graziano and Mauro Tosco. 2003. "The classification of Ongota". In Bender et al. eds, Selected comparative-historical Afrasian linguistic studies. LINCOM Europa.