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The Cushitic languages are a branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family spoken in the Horn of Africa. They are named after the Biblical figure Cush by analogy with Semitic. The most populous Cushitic language is Oromo with about 35 million speakers, followed by Somali with about 15 million speakers, and Sidamo in Ethiopia with about 2 million speakers. Other languages with more that one million speakers are Hadia (1.6 million), Kambata (1.4 million), and Afar (1.5 million).

Dark green: Cushitic languages

Composition

There are eight clearly valid groups of languages which are or have been included in the Cushitic family, and there is a wide range of opinions as to how they are interrelated. The only group to have escaped controversy is the Agaw languages, or Central Cushitic, which is a distinct branch of Cushitic in all classifications.

The Beja language, or North Cushitic, is sometimes placed outside Cushitic proper, though there is no evidence that the rest of Cushitic forms a valid group.

The positions of the small Dullay languages and Yaaku are uncertain. These have traditionally been assigned to an East Cushitic branch along with Highland (Sidamic) and Lowland East Cushitic. However, Richard Hayward believes East Cushitic may not be a valid node and breaks it into three well-supported families: Highlands, a diverse Lowlands family (with Afar, Somalic, and Oromic branches), and Dullay (he apparently leaves Yaaku unclassified), which he believes should be considered separately when attempting to work out the internal relationships of Cushitic.

Hetzron (1980:70ff) and Ehret (1995) have suggested that the Rift languages (South Cushitic) are a part of Lowland East Cushitic.^{citation needed}

Cushitic was traditionally seen as also including the Omotic languages, then called West Cushitic. However, this view has largely been abandoned, primarily due to the work of Harold C. Fleming (1974) and M. Lionel Bender (1975). These scholars consider Omotic to be an independent branch of Afro-Asiatic. While some scholars including Zaborski (1986) and Lamberti (1991) have kept the issue alive and suggested that Omotic can still be classified as part of Cushitic, the latest research by Rolf Theil (2006), in keeping with the noted Chadicist Paul Newman, excludes Omotic from Afro-Asiatic altogether. He proposes that it be treated instead as an independent language family on the basis that no closer genetic relations have been demonstrated between Omotic and Afro-Asiatic than between Omotic and any other language family.¹

Notes

References

• Ethnologue entry for Cushitic languages
• Bender, Marvin Lionel. 1975. Omotic: a new Afroasiatic language family. Southern Illinois University Museum series, number 3.
• Bender, M. Lionel. 1986. A possible Cushomotic isomorph. Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere 6:149-155.
• Fleming, Harold C. 1974. Omotic as an Afroasiatic family. In: Proceedings of the 5th annual conference on African linguistics (ed. by William Leben), p 81-94. African Studies Center & Department of Linguistics, UCLA.
• Roland Kießling & Maarten Mous. 2003. The Lexical Reconstruction of West-Rift Southern Cushitic. Cushitic Language Studies Volume 21
• Lamberti, Marcello. 1991. Cushitic and its classification. Anthropos 86(4/6):552-561.
• Zaborski, Andrzej. 1986. Can Omotic be reclassified as West Cushitic? In Gideon Goldenberg, ed., Ethiopian Studies: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference, pp. 525-530. Rotterdam: Balkema.

External links

• http://www.summerschools.leidenuniv.nl/content_docs/cushitic_bibliography_ss.doc
• http://www.msu.edu/~hudson/HECrefs.htm

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