Southern Cushitic Languages

The South Cushitic or Rift languages of Tanzania are a branch of the Cushitic languages. The most numerous is Iraqw, with one million speakers. Scholars believe that these languages were spoken by Southern Cushitic agro-pastoralists from Ethiopia, who began migrating southward into the Great Rift Valley in the third millennium BC.

History

The original homeland of Proto-South-Cushitic was in southwestern Ethiopia. South Cushitic speakers then migrated south to Lake Turkana in northern Kenya by 3000 BC and further south, entering northern Tanzania in 2000 BC. The speakers of South Cushitic were likely the first peoples to introduce agriculture and pastoralism in the lands east of Lake Victoria. Being the only agriculturalists and pastoralists, they faced no competition and spread rapidly throughout southern East Africa.

As the speakers of South Cushitic rapidly spread throughout Kenya and Tanzania, they encountered hunter-gatherer peoples who preceded them and whom they assimilated and were influenced by (as seen by the loanwords of hunter-gatherer origin found in the South Cushitic languages).

There was a now extinct sister branch to South Cushitic called "Para-Southern Cushitic". The Para-Southern Cushitic languages were once spoken in the Eastern Equatoria region of South Sudan and the Karamoja region of northeastern Uganda before being absorbed by Kuliak, Nilotic and Surmic speakers.

Classification

The Rift languages are named after the Great Rift Valley of Tanzania, where they are found.

Hetzron (1980:70ff) suggested that the Rift languages (South Cushitic) are a part of Lowland East Cushitic. Kießling & Mous (2003) have proposed more specifically that they be linked to a Southern Lowland branch, together with Oromo, Somali, and Yaaku–Dullay. It is possible that the great lexical divergence of Rift from East Cushitic is due to Rift being partially influenced through contact with Khoisan languages, as perhaps evidenced by the unusually high frequency of the ejective affricates and , which outnumber pulmonary consonants like . Kießling & Mous suggest that these ejectives may be remnants of clicks from the source language.

The terms "South Cushitic" and "Rift" are not quite synonymous: The Ma'a and Dahalo languages were once included in South Cushitic, but were not considered Rift. Kießling restricts South Cushitic to West Rift as its only indisputable branch. He states that Dahalo has too many East Cushitic features to belong to South Cushitic, as does Ma'a. (The Waata and Degere may once have spoken languages similar to Dahalo.) He deems Kw'adza and Aasax in turn insufficiently described to classify as even Cushitic with any certainty.

Iraqw and Gorowa are close enough for basic mutual intelligibility. Alagwa has become similar to Burunge through intense contact, and so had previously been classified as a Southern West Rift language. Aasax and Kw'adza are poorly attested and, like Dahalo, maybe the result language shift from non-Cushitic languages.

Several additional and now extinct South Cushitic languages are deduced from their influence on the Bantu languages that replaced them. Two of these, Taita Cushitic, appear to have been more distinct from the current Rift languages than other related languages. They are similar to an earlier form of Rift, which Nurse (1988) calls "Greater Rift".

There was a now-extinct member of the West Rift branch of South Cushitic that Christopher Ehret named "Tale" (pronounced Tah-lay), and Derek Nurse called it simply "West Rift southern Cushites." The Tale Southern Cushites originated south of the Grumeti River in the Mara region and then expanded westward across the Mara plain, stretching their territory across north-central Tanzania (avoiding the lowlands of the southern and western lakeshore and making use of ecological zones suitable for their pastoralism south of Lake Victoria) and then expanded north into the Kagera Region, following both banks of the Kagera river until
the southern side of the Kagera River became their northern boundary. The Tale peoples spoke 7 or more different dialects of their languages.

The Iringa Southern Cushites are another extinct South Cushitic branch that migrated to the northern parts of Tanzania's southern highlands before the first millennium AD. They are named after the Iringa Region of Tanzania.

Notes

References

*BLAŽEK, Václav. 2005. Current progress in South Cushitic Comparative Historical Linguistics. Folia Orientalia 42, no. 1, pp. 177–224. (Poland. ISSN 0015-5675)
*Ehret, Christopher. 1980. ''The Historical Reconstruction of Southern Cushitic Phonology and Vocabulary''. (Kolner Beitrage zur Afrikanistik). Reimer Verlag.
*Kiessling, Roland. 1995. Verbal Inflectional Suffixes in the West Rift Group of Southern Cushitic. In: Cushitic and Omotic Languages, ed. by C. Griefenow-Mewis und R. M. Voigt. Köln, 59–70.
*Kiessling, Roland. 2000. Some salient features of Southern Cushitic (Common West Rift). Lingua Posnaniensis 42: 69-89
*Kiessling, Roland. 2001. South Cushitic links to East Cushitic. In: New Data and New Methods in Afroasiatic Linguistics - Robert Hetzron in memoriam; ed. by Andrzej Zaborski. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 95–102.
*Kiessling, Roland. 2002. Wille, Initiierung und Kontrolle: zur Morphosemantik von Experiensverben im Südkuschitischen. In: Aktuelle Forschungen zu afrikanischen Sprachen (Tagungsband des 14. Afrikanistentags), ed by Theda Schumann, Mechthild Reh, Roland Kießling & Ludwig Gerhardt. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe, 171–192.
*Kiessling, Roland. 2003. Infix genesis in Southern Cushitic. In: Selected Comparative-Historical Afrasian Linguistic Studies in memory of Igor M. Diakonoff; hrsg. v. Lionel M. Bender, Gabor Takacs & David Appleyard. München: Lincom, 109–122.
*Kiessling, Roland. 2004. Tonogenesis in Southern Cushitic (Common West Rift). In: Stress and Tone – the African Experience, edited by Rose-Juliet Anyanwu. Frankfurter Afrikanistische Blätter 15: 141–163.
*Nurse, Derek. 1988. "Extinct Southern Cushitic Communities in East Africa". In: Bechhaus-Gerst, M. & F. Serzisko (eds), Cushitic-Omotic: Papers from the International Symposium on Cushitic and Omotic Languages. St. Augustin, Jan. 6-9 1986. Hamburg. Helmut Buske. 93–104.
*Roland Kießling and Maarten Mous. 2003. ''The Lexical Reconstruction of West-Rift (Southern Cushitic)''
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External links

''Was there ever a Southern Cushitic Language (Pre-)Ma'a?''

{{DEFAULTSORT:South Cushitic Languages