The Komuz languages are a proposed branch of the

Nilo-Saharan The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of around 210 African languages spoken by somewhere around 70 million speakers, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributari ...

language family which would include the

Koman languages The Koman languages are a small, close-knit family of languages located along the Ethiopia–Sudan border with about 50,000 speakers. They are conventionally classified as part of the Nilo-Saharan family. However, due to the paucity of evidence ...

, the Gumuz languages and the

Shabo language (or preferably ''Chabu''; also called Mikeyir) is an endangered language and likely language isolate spoken by about 400 former hunter-gatherers in southwestern Ethiopia, in the eastern part of the South West Ethiopia Peoples' Region. It was f ...

, all spoken in south-eastern

Sudan Sudan, officially the Republic of the Sudan, is a country in Northeast Africa. It borders the Central African Republic to the southwest, Chad to the west, Libya to the northwest, Egypt to the north, the Red Sea to the east, Eritrea and Ethiopi ...

and western

Ethiopia Ethiopia, officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa region of East Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the north, Djibouti to the northeast, Somalia to the east, Ken ...

. Nilo-Saharan specialists have vacillated on a genealogical relationship between the Koman and Gumuz languages, a relationship called Komuz. Greenberg (1963) had included Gumuz in the Koman language family. Bender (1989, 1991) classified them together in a distant relationship he called Komuz, but by 1996 he had reversed himself, though he kept both groups in core Nilo-Saharan. Dimmendaal (2008) kept them together, though expressed doubts over whether they belonged in Nilo-Saharan, later referring to Gumuz as an isolate (2011). Ahland (2010, 2012), on the basis of new Gumuz data, resurrected the hypothesis. Blench (2010) independently came to the same conclusion and suggested that the

might be a third, outlying branch. The classification of Shabo is difficult because of a strong Koman influence on the language that is independent of any genealogical relationship between them. Schnoebelen (2009), moreover, sees Shabo as a likely isolate. Koman and Gumuz are also grouped together in an automated computational analysis (

ASJP The Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) is a collaborative project applying computational approaches to comparative linguistics using a database of word lists. The database is open access and consists of 40-item basic-vocabulary lists f ...

4) by Müller et al. (2013).Müller, André, Viveka Velupillai, Søren Wichmann, Cecil H. Brown, Eric W. Holman, Sebastian Sauppe, Pamela Brown, Harald Hammarström, Oleg Belyaev, Johann-Mattis List, Dik Bakker, Dmitri Egorov, Matthias Urban, Robert Mailhammer, Matthew S. Dryer, Evgenia Korovina, David Beck, Helen Geyer, Pattie Epps, Anthony Grant, and Pilar Valenzuela. 2013.
ASJP World Language Trees of Lexical Similarity: Version 4 (October 2013)
'. However, since the analysis was automatically generated, the grouping could be either due to mutual lexical borrowing or genetic inheritance.

Languages

Shabo is included per Blench (2010). * Komuz ** *** Koman *** Gumuz ** Shabo

External links

video of Colleen Ahland speaking on the classification of Koman and Gumuz

References

{{Reflist * Colleen Ahland, "The Classification of Gumuz and Koman Languages

presented at the ''Language Isolates in Africa'' workshop, Lyons, December 4, 2010 * Colleen Ahland, 2012. "A Grammar of Northern and Southern Gumuz", doctoral dissertation, University of Oregon. * Lionel Bender (linguist), Lionel Bender, 1983. "Proto-Koman phonology and lexicon", "Afrika und Übersee" 66: 259–297. * Lionel Bender, 1991. "Subclassification of Nilo-Saharan". In M. Lionel Bender, ed., Proceedings of the Fourth Nilo-Saharan Linguistics Colloquium, Bayreuth, Aug.30-Sep.2, 1989. NISA 7, 1–35. Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag. * Lionel Bender, 1996. "The Nilo-Saharan languages: a comparative essay", Munich: Lincom Europa. * Lionel Bender, 2000. "Nilo-Saharan". In Bernd Heine and Derek Nurse, eds., ''African Languages: An Introduction.'' Cambridge University Press. *

Roger Blench Roger Marsh Blench (born August 1, 1953) is a British linguist, ethnomusicologist and development anthropologist. He has an M.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and is based in Cambridge, England. He researches, publishes, and work ...

, 2010. Commentary on Ahland (2010) at the ''Language Isolates in Africa'' workshop, Lyons, December 4, 2010 * Gerrit Dimmendaal, 2008. "Language Ecology and Linguistic Diversity on the African Continent", ''Language and Linguistics Compass'' 2/5:842. * Gerrit J. Dimmendaal, 2011. "Historical linguistics and the comparative study of African languages". Philadelphia: John Benjamins. *

Joseph Greenberg Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915 – May 7, 2001) was an American linguist, known mainly for his work concerning linguistic typology and the genetic classification of languages. Life Early life and education Joseph Greenberg was born on M ...

, 1963. ''The Languages of Africa'' (''International Journal of American Linguistics'' 29.1). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. * Tyler Schnoebelen, 2009. "(Un)classifying Shabo: phylogenetic methods and results". Peter K. Austin, Oliver Bond, Monik Charette, David Nathan & Peter Sells, eds., ''Proceedings of Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory 2''. London: SOAS

(long version, unpublishe

Komuz languages, Proposed language families