Everything about The Cushitic Languages totally explained
The
Cushitic languages are a subgroup of the
Afro-Asiatic languages, named after the Biblical figure
Cush by analogy with
Semitic. They are spoken in the
Horn of Africa. The most prominent language is
Oromo with about 25 million speakers, followed by
Somali (spoken by ethnic Somalis in
Somalia,
Djibouti,
Ethiopia,
Yemen and
Kenya) with about 15 million speakers,
Sidamo (in Ethiopia) with about 2 million speakers,
Hadia with about 1.6 million native speakers,
Kambata with about 1.4 million native speakers, and
Afar (in
Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Djibouti) with about 1.5 million speakers. It is divided into the following subgroups, as per
Joseph Greenberg, as modified by
Harold Fleming:
Robert Hetzron has suggested that the South Cushitic languages are a subgroup of Lowland East Cushitic. Maarten Mous, in his
24 June 2005 oration at Leiden University, has suggested more specifically that South Cushitic be linked to the Southern Lowland East Cushitic branch, together with such languages as Oromo, the Omo-Tana languages (such as Somali), and Yaaku-Dullay.
Richard Hayward, on the other hand, breaks up East Cushitic into three well-supported families: 1)
Sidamic or Highlands, 2)a diverse Lowlands family (with
Afar,
Somalic, and
Oromic subgroups), and 3)
Dullay (he apparently leaves
Yaaku unclassified), that he believes should be considered separately when attempting to work out the internal relationships of Cushitic. This makes for a tentative four to seven branches, depending on the status of Beja, Rift, and Yaaku.
Cushitic was traditionally seen as also including the
Omotic languages, then called
West Cushitic, but this view has been abandoned by many, largely due to the work of
Harold C. Fleming (1974) and M.
Lionel Bender (1975). These scholars consider
Omotic an independent branch of Afro-Asiatic. However, Zaborski (1986) and Lamberti (1991) have still kept the issue alive, showing possible evidence that Omotic can still be classified as part of Cushitic. Even Bender reconsidered the idea (1986).
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