| Lowland East Cushitic | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution: |
Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya |
| Genetic classification: |
Cushitic Lowland East Cushitic |
| Subdivisions: |
Omo-Tana (perhaps not a single group)
? Dahalo
? Rift
? Ongota
|
The Lowland East Cushitic languages comprise two dozen languages of the Cushitic family within
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 language is Oromo, with about 21 million speakers. Other prominent languages include Somali (spoken by ethnic Somalis in Somalia, Ethiopia, Yemen, Djibouti, and Kenya) with about 15 million speakers, and 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,[citation needed] 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 Komso-Gidole and the endangered Boon language.
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.
External links
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