The South Cushitic or Rift languages of

Tanzania Tanzania (; ), officially the United Republic of Tanzania ( sw, Jamhuri ya Muungano wa Tanzania), is a country in East Africa within the African Great Lakes region. It borders Uganda to the north; Kenya to the northeast; Comoro Islands and ...

are a branch of the

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 the Sudan, and to the south in Kenya and Tanzania. As ...

. The most numerous is Iraqw, with half a million speakers. These languages are believed to have been originally spoken by Southern Cushitic agro-pastoralists from

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 ...

, who in the third millennium BC began migrating southward into the

Great Rift Valley The Great Rift Valley is a series of contiguous geographic trenches, approximately in total length, that runs from Lebanon in Asia to Mozambique in Southeast Africa. While the name continues in some usages, it is rarely used in geology as it i ...

Urheimat

The original homeland of Proto-South Cushitic was in Southwest Ethiopia. South cushitic speakers then migrated south to lake Turkana and further south, entering Tanzania in 2000BC.

Classification

The Rift languages are named after the

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 relexified through contact with

Khoisan languages The Khoisan languages (; also Khoesan or Khoesaan) are a group of African languages originally classified together by Joseph Greenberg. Khoisan languages share click consonants and do not belong to other African language families. For much of th ...

, 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 The Waata (Waat, Watha), or Sanye, are an Oromo-speaking people of Kenya and former hunter-gatherers. They share the name ''Sanye'' with the neighboring Dahalo. The current language of the Waata may be a dialect of Orma or otherwise Southern ...

and

Degere The Degere are a Mijikenda-speaking group of former hunter-gatherers of Kenya and Tanzania, now settled along the Ramisi, Mwena and Umba rivers, with a few along the coast. They may number no more than a few hundred to at most a few thousand. ...

may once have spoken languages similar to Dahalo.) Kw'adza and Aasax are in turn insufficiently described to classify as even Cushitic with any certainty.Roland Kießling, "South Cushitic links to East Cushitic", in Zaborski ed, 2001, ''New Data and New Methods in Afroasiatic Linguistics'' Iraqw and Gorowa are close enough for basic

mutual intelligibility In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as an ...

. 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, may be the result of 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. A pair of these, Taita Cushitic, appear to have been more divergent than extant Rift languages, co-ordinate with Proto-Rift within a larger group Nurse (1988) calls "Greater Rift".

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 Roland (; frk, *Hrōþiland; lat-med, Hruodlandus or ''Rotholandus''; it, Orlando or ''Rolando''; died 15 August 778) was a Frankish military leader under Charlemagne who became one of the principal figures in the literary cycle known as the ...

Ludwig Gerhardt Ludwig Gerhardt (born November 1, 1938 in Halle an der Saale) is a German linguist and Africanist. He is known for his work on various languages of Africa, particularly the Plateau languages of Nigeria. Education Ludwig Gerhardt is the son of Die ...

. 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)'' *

External links

''Was there ever a Southern Cushitic Language (Pre-)Ma'a?''
{{DEFAULTSORT:South Cushitic Languages