The Ethiopian language area is a hypothesized

linguistic area A sprachbund (, lit. "language federation"), also known as a linguistic area, area of linguistic convergence, or diffusion area, is a group of languages that share areal features resulting from geographical proximity and language contact. The lang ...

that was first proposed by

Charles A. Ferguson Charles Albert Ferguson (July 6, 1921 – September 2, 1998) was an American linguist who taught at Stanford University. He was one of the founders of sociolinguistics and is best known for his work on diglossia. The TOEFL test was created under ...

(1970, 1976), who posited a number of phonological and morphosyntactic features that were found widely across

Ethiopia Ethiopia, , om, Itiyoophiyaa, so, Itoobiya, ti, ኢትዮጵያ, Ítiyop'iya, aa, Itiyoppiya officially the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a landlocked country in the Horn of Africa. It shares borders with Eritrea to the ...

and

Eritrea Eritrea ( ; ti, ኤርትራ, Ertra, ; ar, إرتريا, ʾIritriyā), officially the State of Eritrea, is a country in the Horn of Africa region of Eastern Africa, with its capital and largest city at Asmara. It is bordered by Ethiopia ...

, including the

Ethio-Semitic Ethiopian Semitic (also Ethio-Semitic, Ethiosemitic, Ethiopic or Abyssinian) is a family of languages spoken in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Sudan. They form the western branch of the South Semitic languages, itself a sub-branch of Semitic, part 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 ...

and

Omotic languages The Omotic languages are a group of languages spoken in southwestern Ethiopia, in the Omo River region. The Ge'ez script is used to write some of the Omotic languages, the Latin script for some others. They are fairly agglutinative and have com ...

but not the

Nilo-Saharan languages The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of African languages spoken by some 50–60 million people, mainly in the upper parts of the Chari River, Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of the ...

. Others scholars have since pointed out smaller areas of shared features within the larger area (Appleyard 1989, Breeze 1988, Sasse 1986, Tosco 1994, Wedekind 1989). One of area's most notable features seems to be the use of the verb "say" as an inflected dummy element for an uninflected lexical base (Appleyard 2001, Cohen ''et al.'' 2002). Hayward also pointed out patterns of

lexicalisation In linguistics, lexicalization is the process of adding words, set phrases, or word patterns to a language's lexicon. Whether ''word formation'' and ''lexicalization'' refer to the same process is controversial within the field of linguistics. Mo ...

as evidence of a shared linguistic unity across the area (1999, 2000), and Treis noted further examples (2010). Though Tosco earlier accepted that the area's status had "long been well established" (1994:415), he later challenged Ferguson's work as flawed (2000). He concludes that the Ethiopian language area is not valid and suggests that Ferguson's work reflects the politics of his time, when there was a strong emphasis on Ethiopian unity, as reflected in Donald N. Levine's book ''Greater Ethiopia: The Evolution of a Multiethnic Society.'' Baye Yiman has shown evidence of pragmatic similarities among languages of the Ethiopian language area (1997). Güldemann has proposed that the use of a generic auxiliary is an area feature that includes Ethiopia but also other languages to its west and northwest. Similarly, Cohen, Simeone-Senelle, and Vanhove have examined the grammaticalised use of "say" and "do" as an area feature of what the scholars call "

East Africa East Africa, Eastern Africa, or East of Africa, is the eastern subregion of the African continent. In the United Nations Statistics Division scheme of geographic regions, 10-11-(16*) territories make up Eastern Africa: Due to the historical ...

". Wu Tong has examined prenominal relative clauses as an areal feature in the Ethiopian language area. Tolemariam Fufa Teso has done a broad comparative study of verbal derivation across the area.Fufa Teso, Tolemariam. ''A typology of verbal derivation in Ethiopian Afro-Asiatic languages''. LOT, Utrecht, 2009. The existence of the area is still debated.

Citations

References

* Appleyard, David. 1989. The relative verb in focus constructions: an Ethiopian areal feature. ''Journal of Semitic Studies'' 34(2): 291-305. * Appleyard, David. 2001. The verb 'to say' as a verb "recycling device" in Ethiopian languages. ''New Data and New Methods in Afroasiatic Linguistics:

Robert Hetzron Robert Hetzron, born Herzog (31 December 1937, Budapest – 12 August 1997, Santa Barbara, California), was a Hungarian-born linguist known for his work on the comparative study of Afro-Asiatic languages, as well as for his study of Cushitic ...

, in Memoriam'',

Andrzej Zaborski Andrzej is the Polish language, Polish form of the given name Andrew. Notable individuals with the given name Andrzej

* Andrzej Bartkowiak (born 1950), Polish film director and cinematographer * Andrew Bobola, Andrzej Bobola, S.J. (1591–16 ...

, ed., 1-11. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. * Breeze, Mary. 1988. Phonological features of Gimira and Dizi. In Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst and Fritz Serzisko (eds.), ''Cushitic - Omotic: papers from the International Symposium on Cushitic and Omotic languages, Cologne, January 6–9, 1986'', 473-487. Hamburg: Helmut Buske Verlag. * Cohen, D., M.-C. Simeone-Senelle and M. Vanhove. 2002. The grammaticalization of 'say' and 'do': An areal phenomenon in East Africa. In T. Güldemann and M. V. Rocador, eds., ''Reported discourse: a Meeting ground for different linguistic domains,'' 227-251. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins. * Crass, Joachim. 2002. Ejectives and pharyngeal fricatives: Two features of the Ethiopian language area. ''Ethiopian Studies at the end of the second millennium. Proceedings of the XIVth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, November 6–11, 2000, Addis Ababa'', ed. by Baye Yimam,

Richard Pankhurst Richard Marsden Pankhurst (1834 – 5 July 1898) was an English barrister and socialist who was a strong supporter of women's rights. Early life Richard Pankhurst was the son of Henry Francis Pankhurst (1806–1873) and Margaret Marsden (180 ...

, David Chapple, Yonas Admassu,

Alula Pankhurst Alula Pankhurst (born 1962) is an Ethiopian scholar and social development consultant whose main focus is Ethiopia and Ethiopian studies. He has worked in Ethiopia for many years in a variety of positions including as an associate professor of a ...

, and Berhanu Teferra, 1679–1691. Addis Ababa: Institute of Ethiopian Studies. * Crass, Joachim and Ronny Meyer (eds.). 2007. ''Deictics, Copula and Focus in the Ethiopian Convergence Area.'' (Afrikanistische Forschungen Band XV). Köln: Rüdiger Köppe. {{ISBN, 978-3-89645-293-1 * Crass, Joachim and Ronny Meyer (eds.). 2009. ''Language contact and language change in Ethiopia.'' Köln: Rüdiger Köppe. * Ferguson, Charles. 1970. The Ethiopian Language Area. ''The Journal of Ethiopian Studies'' 8.2: 67-80. * Ferguson, Charles. 1976. The Ethiopian Language Area. ''Language in Ethiopia'', ed. by M. Lionel Bender, J. Donald Bowen, Robert Cooper, Charles Ferguson, pp. 63–76. Oxford University Press. * Güldemann, Tom. 2005. Complex predicates based on generic auxiliaries as an areal feature in Northeast Africa. ''Studies in African linguistic typology'', ed. by F. K. Erhard Voeltz, 131-154. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. * Hayward, Richard J. 1991. Á propos patterns of lexicalization in the Ethiopian Language Area. In Daniela Mendel and Ulrike Claudi, ''Ägypten im afroorientalischen Kontext''. Special issue of ''Afrikanistische Arbeitspapiere''. Cologne: Institute of African Studies, pp. 139–56. * Hayward Richard J. 2000. "Is There a Metric for Convergence." In Colin Renfrew, April McMahon and Larry Trask (eds) ''Time Depth in Historical Linguistics'' Vol 2 (Papers in the Prehistory of Languages), 621-640. Cambrdige: The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. * Meyer, Ronny, 2005. Riddles as indicator of cultural and linguistic convergence in the Gurage region: Ethiopia as language and cultural area. ''Scrinium'' 1:174-196. * Sasse, Hans-Jürgen. 1986. A Southwest Ethiopian Language area and its cultural background. In ''The Fergusonian Impact, vol. 1: From Phonology to Society'', ed. by Joshua A. Fishman et al., pp. 327–342. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. * Tosco, Mauro. 1994. On Case Marking in the Ethiopian Language Area (with special reference to subject marking in East Cushitic), ''Sem Cam Iafet. Atti della 7ª Giornata di Studi Camito-Semitici e Indeuropei (Milano, 1° giugno 1993)''. In Vermondo Brugnatelli (a cura di), 225-244. Milano: Centro Studi Camito-Semitici. * Tosco, Mauro. 1994. The historical syntax of East Cushitic: A first sketch. ''Perspektiven afrikanistischer Forschung'', ed. by Thomas Bearth, Wilhelm J.G Möhlig, Beat Sottas, Edgar Suter, pp. 415–440. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe. * Tosco, Mauro. 2000. Is there an Ethiopian Language Area? ''Anthropological Linguistics'' 42:329-365. * Treis, Yvonne. 2010. Perception verbs and taste adjectives in Kambaata and beyond. In Anne Storch, (ed.), ''Perception of the Invisible. Religion, Historical Semantics and the Role of Perceptive Verbs'' (SUGIA – Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika, 21) Cologne: Köppe. pp. 313–346
Article online
* Wedekind, Klaus. 1989. Status and dynamics of Ethiopian vowel systems. ''Journal of Ethiopian Studies'' 22: 105-136. * Wu Tong. 2012. 2012. Prenominal relative clauses in Ethiopian languages: From inside and from outside. ''Studies in African Linguistics'' 41.2: 213-252. * Yiman, Baye. 1997.The pragmatics of greeting, felicitation, and condolence expressions in four Ethiopian languages. ''African Languages and Cultures'' 10.2: 103-128. * Zaborski, Andrzej. 1991. Ethiopian Language Subareas. In Stanislaw Pilaszewicz and Eugeniusz Rzewuski, eds. ''Unwritten Testimonies of the African Past,'' (Orientalia Varsoviensia, 2) pp. 123–134. Warszaw: Wydawnictwa Uniwesytetu Warszawskiego. * Zaborski, Andrzej. 2010. Language Subareas in Ethiopia Reconsidered. ''Journal Lingua Posnaniensis'' 52.2: 99-110.

Citations

References

Further reading