Lowland East Cushitic is a group of roughly two dozen diverse languages of the

Cushitic The Cushitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken primarily in the Horn of Africa, with minorities speaking Cushitic languages to the north in Egypt and the Sudan, and to the south in Kenya and Tanzania. As o ...

branch of the Afro-Asiatic family. Its largest representatives are Somali and Oromo.

Classification

Lowland East Cushitic classification from Tosco (2020:297):Tosco, Mauro. 2020. East Cushitic. In: Vossen, Rainer and Gerrit J. Dimmendaal (eds.). 2020. ''The Oxford Handbook of African Languages'', 290-299. Oxford: Oxford University Press. *Lowland East Cushitic ** Saho–Afar **Southern ***Nuclear **** Omo–Tana **** Oromoid ***Peripheral (?) **** Dullay **** Yaaku Highland East Cushitic is a coordinate (sister) branch with Lowland East Cushitic in Tosco's (2020) classification. 'Core' East Cushitic classification form Bender (2020 008 91). Saho–Afar is excluded, making it equivalent to Tosco's Southern Lowland East Cushitic, and Yaaku is moved into Western Omo–Tana ('Arboroid'): * 'Core' East Cushitic ** Dullay ** SAOK *** Eastern Omo–Tana ( Somaloid) *** Western Omo–Tana ( Arboroid) ncl. Yaaku*** Oromoid ( Oromo–Konsoid) Highland East Cushitic and Afar–Saho are coordinate (sister) branches with Lowland East Cushitic, together forming East Cushitic.

Overview

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 spoken Lowland East Cushitic language is Oromo, with about 35 million speakers in

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and

Kenya ) , national_anthem = " Ee Mungu Nguvu Yetu"() , image_map = , map_caption = , image_map2 = , capital = Nairobi , coordinates = , largest_city = Nairobi ...

. The Konsoid dialect cluster is closely related to Oromo. Other prominent languages include Somali (spoken by ethnic Somalis in

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, Somaliland, Ethiopia,

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, and Kenya) with about 30 million speakers, and Afar (in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti) with about 1.5 million. Robert Hetzron has suggested that the

Rift languages The South Cushitic or Rift languages of Tanzania are a branch of the Cushitic languages. The most numerous is Iraqw, with half a million speakers. These languages are believed to have been originally spoken by Southern Cushitic agro-pastoralists ...

''(South Cushitic)'' are a part of Lowland East Cushitic,Robert Hetzron, "The Limits of Cushitic", ''Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika'' 2. 1980, 7–126. 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 Girirra and perhaps the endangered

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. 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 Afroasiatic.

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.

Classification

Overview

See also

References

Further reading