TheCushitic languages are a branch of theAfroasiatic language family. They are spoken primarily in theHorn of Africa, with minorities speaking Cushitic languages to the north in Egypt and Sudan, and to the south in Kenya and Tanzania. As of 2012, the Cushitic languages with over one million speakers wereOromo,Somali,Beja,Afar,Hadiyya,Kambaata, andSidama.[1]
The Cushitic languages with the greatest number of total speakers areOromo (37 million),[2]Somali (22 million),[3]Beja (3.2 million),[4]Sidamo (3 million),[5] andAfar (2 million).[6]
Oromo serves as one of the official working languages ofEthiopia[7] and is also the working language of several of the states within the Ethiopian federal system includingOromia,[8]Harari andDire Dawa regional states and of theOromia Zone in theAmhara Region.[9]
Somali is the first of two official languages ofSomalia and three official languages ofSomaliland.[10][11] It also serves as a language of instruction inDjibouti,[12] and as the working language of theSomali Region in Ethiopia.[9]
Beja, Afar,Blin andSaho, the languages of the Cushitic branch of Afroasiatic that are spoken inEritrea, are languages of instruction in the Eritrean elementary school curriculum.[13] The constitution of Eritrea also recognizes the equality of all natively spoken languages.[14] Additionally, Afar is a language of instruction in Djibouti,[12] as well as the working language of theAfar Region in Ethiopia.[9]
Christopher Ehret argues for a unified Proto-Cushitic language in the Red Sea Hills as far back as the Early Holocene.[15] The expansion of Cushitic languages of the Southern Cushitic branch into the Rift Valley is associated with theSavanna Pastoral Neolithic.[16]
Most Cushitic languages have a system ofrestrictive tone also known as ‘pitch accent’ in whichtonal contours overlaid on the stressed syllable play a prominent role in morphology and syntax.[17][20]
Nouns are inflected forcase andnumber. All nouns are further grouped into twogender categories, masculine gender and feminine gender. In many languages, gender is overtly marked directly on the noun (e.g. inAwngi, where all female nouns carry the suffix-a).[21]
The case system of many Cushitic languages is characterized bymarked nominative alignment, which istypologically quite rare and predominantly found in languages of Africa.[22] In marked nominative languages, the noun appears in unmarked "absolutive" case when cited in isolation, or when used as predicative noun and as object of a transitive verb; on the other hand, it is explicitly marked for nominative case when it functions as subject in a transitive or intransitive sentence.[23][24]
Possession is usually expressed bygenitive case marking of the possessor.South Cushitic—which has no case marking for subject and object—follows the opposite strategy: here, the possessed noun is marked forconstruct case, e.g. Iraqwafé-r mar'i "doors" (lit. "mouths of houses"), whereafee "mouth" is marked for construct case.[25]
Most nouns are by default unmarked for number, but can be explicitly marked for singular ("singulative") and plural number. E.g. inBilin,dəmmu "cat(s)" is number-neutral, from which singulardəmmura "a single cat" and pluraldəmmut "several cats" can be formed. Plural formation is very diverse, and employsablaut (i.e. changes of root vowels or consonants),suffixes andreduplication.[26][27]
Verbs are inflected for person/number and tense/aspect. Many languages also have a special form of the verb in negative clauses.[28]
Most Cushitic languages distinguish seven person/number categories: first, second, third person, singular and plural number, with a masculine/feminine gender distinction in third person singular. The most common conjugation type employs suffixes. Some languages also have a prefix conjugation: inBeja and theSaho–Afar languages, the prefix conjugation is still a productive part of the verb paradigm, whereas in most other languages, e.g.Somali, it is restricted to only a few verbs. It is generally assumed that historically, the suffix conjugation developed from the older prefix conjugation, by combining the verb stem with a suffixed auxiliary verb.[29] The following table gives an example for the suffix and prefix conjugations in affirmative present tense in Somali.[30]
The phylum was first designated asCushitic in 1858.[33] Traditionally, Cushitic has been divided into North Cushitic (consisting solely ofBeja), Central Cushitic (theAgaw languages), and the largeEast Cushitic group. Greenberg (1950) argued for the inclusion of theSouth Cushitic group. TheOmotic languages, once classified as West Cushitic, have almost universally been reclassified as a separate branch of Afroasiatic.
This classification has not been without contention. For example, it has been argued that Southern Cushitic belongs in the Eastern branch, with its divergence explained by contact withHadza- andSandawe-like languages. Hetzron (1980) and Fleming (post-1981) exclude Beja altogether, though this is rejected by other linguists. Some of the classifications that have been proposed over the years are summarized here:
Beja constitutes the only member of the Northern Cushitic subgroup. As such, Beja contains a number of linguistic innovations that are unique to it, as is also the situation with the other subgroups of Cushitic (e.g. idiosyncratic features inAgaw or Central Cushitic).[37][38][39]Hetzron (1980) argues that Beja therefore may comprise an independent branch of the Afroasiatic family.[35] However, this suggestion has been rejected by most other scholars.[40] The characteristics of Beja that differ from those of other Cushitic languages are instead generally acknowledged as normal branch variation.[37]
Didier Morin (2001) assigned Beja to Lowland East Cushitic on the grounds that the language shared lexical and phonological features with the Afar and Saho idioms, and also because the languages were historically spoken in adjacent speech areas. However, among linguists specializing in the Cushitic languages, the standard classification of Beja as North Cushitic is accepted.[41]
Blemmyan, an early form of Beja – mostly attested throughonomastic evidence, but also directly by a small text on anostracon fromSaqqara – was spoken by theBlemmyes, an ancient people of Lower Nubia that appears in the Egyptian historical records from the 6th century BCE onwards. It is also likely that theMedjay spoke a language that was ancestral to Beja.[42]
Cushitic was formerly seen as also including most or all of theOmotic languages. An early view byEnrico Cerulli proposed a "Sidama" subgroup comprising most of the Omotic languages and the Sidamic group of Highland East Cushitic. Mario Martino Moreno in 1940 divided Cerulli's Sidama, uniting the Sidamic proper and the Lowland Cushitic languages as East Cushitic, the remainder as West Cushitic orta/ne Cushitic. TheAroid languages were not considered Cushitic by either scholar (thought by Cerulli to be insteadNilotic); they were added to West Cushitic byJoseph Greenberg in 1963. Further work in the 1960s soon led to the putative West Cushitic being seen as typologically divergent and renamed as "Omotic".[43]
Today the inclusion of Omotic as a part of Cushitic has been abandoned. Omotic is most often seen as an independent branch of Afroasiatic, primarily due to the work ofHarold C. Fleming (1974) andLionel Bender (1975); some linguists likePaul Newman (1980) challenge Omotic's classification within the Afroasiatic family itself.
There are also a few languages of uncertain classification, includingYaaku,Dahalo,Aasax,Kw'adza,Boon,Ongota and the Cushitic component ofMbugu (Ma'a). There is a wide range of opinions as to how the languages are interrelated.[44]
The positions of the Dullay languages and of Yaaku are uncertain. They have traditionally been assigned to an East Cushitic subbranch along with Highland (Sidamic) and Lowland East Cushitic. However, Hayward thinks that East Cushitic may not be a valid node and that its constituents should be considered separately when attempting to work out the internal relationships of Cushitic.[44] Bender (2020) suggests Yaaku to be a divergent member of the Arboroid group.[45]
The Afroasiatic identity ofOngota has also been broadly questioned, as is its position within Afroasiatic among those who accept it, because of the "mixed" appearance of the language and a paucity of research and data.Harold C. Fleming (2006) proposes that Ongota is a separate branch of Afroasiatic.[46] Bonny Sands (2009) thinks the most convincing proposal is by Savà and Tosco (2003), namely that Ongota is an East Cushitic language with aNilo-Saharansubstratum. In other words, it would appear that the Ongota people once spoke a Nilo-Saharan language but then shifted to speaking a Cushitic language while retaining some characteristics of their earlier Nilo-Saharan language.[47][48]
Hetzron (1980)[49] andEhret (1995) have suggested that the South Cushitic languages (Rift languages) are a part of Lowland East Cushitic, the only one of the six groups with much internal diversity.
Some of the ancient peoples ofNubia are hypothesized to have spoken languages belonging to the Cushitic group, especially the people of theC-Group culture. It has been speculated that these people left a substratum of Cushitic words in the modern Nubian languages. Given the scarcity of data (all omomastic ortoponymic), however, it remains unclear if the C-Group culture in fact spoke a Cushitic language.[50]
Christopher Ehret (1998) proposed on the basis of loanwords that South Cushitic languages (called "Tale" and "Bisha" by Ehret) were spoken in an area closer to Lake Victoria than are found today.[51][52]
Christopher Ehret proposed a reconstruction of Proto-Cushitic in 1987, but did not base this on individual branch reconstructions.[55]Grover Hudson (1989) has done some preliminary work on Highland East Cushitic,[56] David Appleyard (2006) has proposed a reconstruction of Proto-Agaw,[57] and Roland Kießling and Maarten Mous (2003) have jointly proposed a reconstruction of West Rift Southern Cushitic.[58] No reconstruction has been published for Lowland East Cushitic, though Paul D. Black wrote his (unpublished) dissertation on the topic in 1974.[59] Hans-Jürgen Sasse (1979) proposed a reconstruction of the consonants of Proto-East Cushitic.[60] No comparative work has yet brought these branch reconstructions together.
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^Eberhard, David M.; Simons, Gary F.; Fennig, Charles D., eds. (2021)."Somali".Ethnologue: Languages of the World (Twenty-fourth ed.). Dallas, Texas: SIL International. Retrieved20 April 2021.
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^Savà, Graziano; Tosco, Mauro (2003). "The classification of Ongota". In Bender, M. Lionel; et al. (eds.).Selected comparative-historical Afrasian linguistic studies. LINCOM Europa.
^Kießling, Roland; Mous, Maarten; Nurse, Derek (2007)."The Tanzanian Rift Valley area". In Bernd Heine; Derek Nurse (eds.).A Linguistic Geography of Africa. Cambridge University Press. Retrieved22 March 2020.
^Heine, Bernd, Franz Rottland & Rainer Voßen. 1979. Proto-Baz: Some aspects of early Nilotic-Cushitic contacts.Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika 1. 75‒92.
^Ehret, Christopher. 1987. Proto-Cushitic Reconstruction. InSprache und Geschichte in Afrika 8: 7–180. University of Cologne.
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Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic (Proto-Afrasian): Vowels, Tone, Consonants, and Vocabulary (1995)Christopher Ehret
