Cushitic languages

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 Sudan, and to the south in Kenya and Tanzania. As of 2012, the Cushitic languages with over one million speakers were Oromo, Somali, Beja, Afar, Hadiyya, Kambaata, and Sidama.

Official status

The Cushitic languages with the greatest number of total speakers are Oromo, Somali, Beja, Sidamo, and Afar.
Oromo serves as one of the official working languages of Ethiopia and is also the working language of several of the states within the Ethiopian federal system including Oromia, Harari and Dire Dawa regional states and of the Oromia Zone in the Amhara Region.
Somali is the first of two official languages of Somalia and three official languages of Somaliland. It also serves as a language of instruction in Djibouti, and as the working language of the Somali Region in Ethiopia.
Beja, Afar, Blin and Saho, the languages of the Cushitic branch of Afroasiatic that are spoken in Eritrea, are languages of instruction in the Eritrean elementary school curriculum. The constitution of Eritrea also recognizes the equality of all natively spoken languages. Additionally, Afar is a language of instruction in Djibouti, as well as the working language of the Afar Region in Ethiopia.

Origin and prehistory

argues for a unified Proto-Cushitic language in the Red Sea Hills as far back as the Early Holocene. The expansion of Cushitic languages of the Southern Cushitic branch into the Rift Valley is associated with the Savanna Pastoral Neolithic.

Typological characteristics

Phonology

Most Cushitic languages have a simple five-vowel system with phonemic length ; a notable exception are the Agaw languages, which do not contrast vowel length, but have one or two additional central vowels. The consonant inventory of many Cushitic languages includes glottalic consonants, e.g. in Oromo, which has the ejectives and the implosive. Less common are pharyngeal consonants, which appear e.g. in Somali or the Saho–Afar languages.
Most Cushitic languages have a system of restrictive tone also known as "pitch accent" in which tonal contours overlaid on the stressed syllable play a prominent role in morphology and syntax.

Grammar

Nouns

Nouns are inflected for case and number. All nouns are further grouped into two gender categories, masculine gender and feminine gender. In many languages, gender is overtly marked directly on the noun.
The case system of many Cushitic languages is characterized by marked nominative alignment, which is typologically quite rare and predominantly found in languages of Africa. In marked nominative languages, the noun appears in unmarked "absolutive" case when cited in isolation, or when used as predicative noun and as object of a transitive verb; on the other hand, it is explicitly marked for nominative case when it functions as subject in a transitive or intransitive sentence.
Possession is usually expressed by genitive case marking of the possessor. South Cushitic—which has no case marking for subject and object—follows the opposite strategy: here, the possessed noun is marked for construct case, e.g. Iraqw afé-r mar'i "doors", where afee "mouth" is marked for construct case.
Most nouns are by default unmarked for number, but can be explicitly marked for singular and plural number. E.g. in Bilin, dəmmu "cat" is number-neutral, from which singular dəmmura "a single cat" and plural dəmmut "several cats" can be formed. Plural formation is very diverse, and employs ablaut, suffixes and reduplication.

Verbs

Verbs are inflected for person/number and tense/aspect. Many languages also have a special form of the verb in negative clauses.
Most Cushitic languages distinguish seven person/number categories: first, second, third person, singular and plural number, with a masculine/feminine gender distinction in third person singular. The most common conjugation type employs suffixes. Some languages also have a prefix conjugation: in Beja and the Saho–Afar languages, the prefix conjugation is still a productive part of the verb paradigm, whereas in most other languages, e.g. Somali, it is restricted to only a few verbs. It is generally assumed that historically, the suffix conjugation developed from the older prefix conjugation, by combining the verb stem with a suffixed auxiliary verb. The following table gives an example for the suffix and prefix conjugations in affirmative present tense in Somali.

Syntax

Basic word order is verb final, the most common order being subject–object–verb. The subject or object can also follow the verb to indicate focus.

Classification

Overview

The phylum was first designated as Cushitic in 1858. Traditionally, Cushitic has been divided into North Cushitic, Central Cushitic, and the large East Cushitic group. Greenberg argued for the inclusion of the South Cushitic group. The Omotic languages, once classified as West Cushitic, have almost universally been reclassified as a separate branch of Afroasiatic.

Cushitic
* North Cushitic
* Central Cushitic
* East Cushitic
* South Cushitic

This classification has not been without contention. For example, it has been argued that Southern Cushitic belongs in the Eastern branch, with its divergence explained by contact with Hadza- and Sandawe-like languages. Hetzron and Fleming exclude Beja altogether, though this is rejected by other linguists. Some of the classifications that have been proposed over the years are summarized here:

Greenberg	Hetzron	Orel & Stolbova	Ehret
Cushitic * Northern Cushitic * Central Cushitic * Eastern Cushitic * Western Cushitic * Southern Cushitic	Beja Cushitic Highland Rift Valley Agaw Lowland Saho–Afar Southern *Omo-Tana Oromoid Dullay Yaaku **Iraqw	Cushitic * Omotic * Beja * Agaw * Sidamic * East Lowlands * Rift	Cushitic * North Cushitic * Agäw–East–South Cushitic Agäw East–South Cushitic * Eastern Cushitic * Southern Cushitic

For debate on the placement of the Cushitic branch within Afroasiatic, see Afroasiatic languages.

Beja

Beja constitutes the only member of the Northern Cushitic subgroup. As such, Beja contains a number of linguistic innovations that are unique to it, as is also the situation with the other subgroups of Cushitic. Hetzron argues that Beja therefore may comprise an independent branch of the Afroasiatic family. However, this suggestion has been rejected by most other scholars. The characteristics of Beja that differ from those of other Cushitic languages are instead generally acknowledged as normal branch variation.
Didier Morin assigned Beja to Lowland East Cushitic on the grounds that the language shared lexical and phonological features with the Afar and Saho idioms, and also because the languages were historically spoken in adjacent speech areas. However, among linguists specializing in the Cushitic languages, the standard classification of Beja as North Cushitic is accepted.
Blemmyan, an early form of Beja – mostly attested through onomastic evidence, but also directly by a small text on an ostracon from Saqqara – was spoken by the Blemmyes, an ancient people of Lower Nubia that appears in the Egyptian historical records from the 6th century BCE onwards. It is also likely that the Medjay spoke a language that was ancestral to Beja.

Omotic

Cushitic was formerly seen as also including most or all of the Omotic languages. An early view by Enrico Cerulli proposed a "Sidama" subgroup comprising most of the Omotic languages and the Sidamic group of Highland East Cushitic. Mario Martino Moreno in 1940 divided Cerulli's Sidama, uniting the Sidamic proper and the Lowland Cushitic languages as East Cushitic, the remainder as West Cushitic or ta/ne Cushitic. The Aroid languages were not considered Cushitic by either scholar ; they were added to West Cushitic by Joseph Greenberg in 1963. Further work in the 1960s soon led to the putative West Cushitic being seen as typologically divergent and renamed as "Omotic".
Today the inclusion of Omotic as a part of Cushitic has been abandoned. Omotic is most often seen as an independent branch of Afroasiatic, primarily due to the work of Harold C. Fleming and Lionel Bender ; some linguists like Paul Newman challenge Omotic's classification within the Afroasiatic family itself.

Other divergent languages

There are also a few languages of uncertain classification, including Yaaku, Dahalo, Aasax, Kw'adza, Boon, Ongota and the Cushitic component of Mbugu. There is a wide range of opinions as to how the languages are interrelated.
The positions of the Dullay languages and of Yaaku are uncertain. They have traditionally been assigned to an East Cushitic subbranch along with Highland and Lowland East Cushitic. However, Hayward thinks that East Cushitic may not be a valid node and that its constituents should be considered separately when attempting to work out the internal relationships of Cushitic. Bender suggests Yaaku to be a divergent member of the Arboroid group.
The Afroasiatic identity of Ongota has also been broadly questioned, as is its position within Afroasiatic among those who accept it, because of the "mixed" appearance of the language and a paucity of research and data. Harold C. Fleming proposes that Ongota is a separate branch of Afroasiatic. Bonny Sands thinks the most convincing proposal is by Savà and Tosco, namely that Ongota is an East Cushitic language with a Nilo-Saharan substratum. In other words, it would appear that the Ongota people once spoke a Nilo-Saharan language but then shifted to speaking a Cushitic language while retaining some characteristics of their earlier Nilo-Saharan language.
Hetzron and Ehret have suggested that the South Cushitic languages are a part of Lowland East Cushitic, the only one of the six groups with much internal diversity.