Highland East Cushitic, or Sidamic, is a branch of the
Afroasiatic language family
The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic), also known as Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic, and sometimes also as Afrasian, Erythraean or Lisramic, are a language family of about 300 languages that are spoken predominantly in the geographic su ...
spoken in south-central
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 ...
. They are often grouped with
Lowland East Cushitic,
Dullay, and
Yaaku as ''East Cushitic'', but that group is not well defined and is considered dubious.
The languages are:
*
Burji (divergent)
*Sidamic proper
**
Sidama
**
Gedeo
**
Hadiyya–
Libido
**
Kambaata–
Alaba.
Except for Burji, they are closely related. Hadiyya and Libido are especially close, as are Kambaata and Alaba. The most populous language is
Sidama, with close to two million speakers.
Notes
References
*Hudson, Grover. 1981. The Highland East Cushitic family vine. ''Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika'' 3.97-124.
*Hudson, Grover. 1988. The Highland Cushitic hypothesis. ''Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies'' (Addis Ababa, 1984), Taddese Beyene, ed., 693-696. Birmingham, England: Elm Press.
*Hudson, Grover. 1989. ''Highland East Cushitic Dictionary'' (Kuschitische Sprachstudien 7). Hamburg: Buske.
*Hudson, Grover. 2005. Highland East Cushitic languages, ''Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics'', 2nd ed., Keith Brown, ed., 294-298. Elsevier: Oxford.
*Hudson, Grover. 2007a. Highland East Cushitic morphology, ''Morphologies of Asian and African Languages'', vol. 1,
Alan S. Kaye
Alan Stewart Kaye (1944-2007) was an American linguist and professor at California State University, Fullerton. He is best known for his works on Semitic and other language families.
He died of cancer on May 31, 2007.
Books
* ''Semitic Studies in ...
, ed., 529-545. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns.
*Sasse, Hans-Jürgen. 1979. The consonant phonemes of Proto-East-Cushitic (PEC): A first approximation. Malibu: Undena Publications.
*Wedekind, Klaus. 1980. Sidamo, Gedeo (Derasa), Burji: Phonological differences and likenesses. ''Journal of Ethiopian Studies'' 14: 131-76.
*Wedekind, Klaus. 1990. ''Generating narratives: interrelations of knowledge, text variants, and Cushitic focus strategies''. Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs, 52. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
East Cushitic languages
Languages of Ethiopia
{{AfroAsiatic-lang-stub