Taita Cushitic is an extinct pair of

South Cushitic languages The South Cushitic or Rift languages of Tanzania are a branch of the Cushitic languages. The most numerous is Iraqw, with half a million speakers. These languages are believed to have been originally spoken by Southern Cushitic agro-pastoralists ...

, spoken by Cushitic peoples inhabiting the

Taita Hills The Taita Hills, sometimes also spelled as Teita Hills, are a mountain range located in the Taita-Taveta County in south-eastern Kenya. The hills consist of three massifs: Dawida, Sagalla in the southern side of Voi township and Kasigau in t ...

Kenya ) , national_anthem = "Ee Mungu Nguvu Yetu"() , image_map = , map_caption = , image_map2 = , capital = Nairobi , coordinates = , largest_city = Nairobi , ...

, before they were assimilated into the Bantu population after the

Bantu Migration The Bantu expansion is a hypothesis about the history of the major series of migrations of the original Proto-Bantu language, Proto-Bantu-speaking Bantu peoples, group, which spread from an original nucleus around Central Africa across much of ...

into East Africa. Evidence for the languages is primarily South Cushitic

loanword A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because th ...

s in the

Bantu languages The Bantu languages (English: , Proto-Bantu: *bantʊ̀) are a large family of languages spoken by the Bantu people of Central, Southern, Eastern africa and Southeast Africa. They form the largest branch of the Southern Bantoid languages. The t ...

Dawida and Saghala (which are sometimes grouped together as the

Taita language Taita is a Bantu language spoken in the Taita Hills of Kenya. It is closely related to the Chaga languages of Kenya and Tanzania. The Saghala (Northern Sagala, Sagalla) variety is distinct enough to be considered a language separate from the D ...

), as well as oral traditions of the Dawida and Saghala.

Overview

According to Derek Nurse and

Christopher Ehret Christopher Ehret (born 27 July 1941), who currently holds the position of Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA, is an American scholar of African history and African historical linguistics particularly known for his efforts to correlate lin ...

, the Taita Cushitic languages consist of a pair of Southern Cushitic languages, which they term "Taita Cushitic A" and "Taita Cushitic B". Ehret and Nurse (1981) suggest that Cushitic-speaking peoples reached the

as early as the second millennium BC. South Cushitic

s that are found today in the Dawida and Saghala varieties of the

Bantu Bantu may refer to: *Bantu languages, constitute the largest sub-branch of the Niger–Congo languages *Bantu peoples, over 400 peoples of Africa speaking a Bantu language * Bantu knots, a type of African hairstyle *Black Association for National ...

indicate that at least three such South Cushitic communities previously inhabited the Taita area. Analysis of the type of South Cushitic loanwords that were adopted by Bantu speakers in the Taita Hills indicates that these South Cushitic communities probably formed a majority of the region's population prior to the arrival of Bantu peoples. Nurse adds that it is likely that the Taita Cushites were completely assimilated only recently since the

lateral consonant A lateral is a consonant in which the airstream proceeds along one or both of the sides of the tongue, but it is blocked by the tongue from going through the middle of the mouth. An example of a lateral consonant is the English ''L'', as in ''Larr ...

s in South Cushitic loanwords that were borrowed by speakers of the Bantu Taita language were still pronounced as such within living memory. However, those laterals have now been replaced. Ehret notes that the Taita Cushitic loanwords that were preserved in the Saghala and Dawida varieties of the Bantu Taita language include terms such as "to buy/sell" and "wild dog". Some of the borrowed Cushitic terms also subsequently underwent sound changes and/or alterations in morphology after adoption by Bantu Taita speakers. Additionally, Nurse suggests that certain South Cushitic loanwords that are today found in the Bantu

Mijikenda language Mijikenda is a Bantu dialect cluster spoken along the coast of East Africa, mostly in Kenya, where there are 1.9 million speakers (2009 census) but also in Tanzania, where there are 100,000 speakers. The name ''Mijikenda'' means "the nine settl ...

are also of Taita Cushitic origin. He adds that these word-borrowings may have been adopted indirectly via Taita Bantu intermediaries, who had themselves borrowed the terms from South Cushites at an earlier date. According to E. H. Merritt (1975), oral traditions of the Taita Bantus likewise assert that two populations, which are usually identified as South Cushitic-speaking peoples, in the past inhabited the Taita Hills before the arrival of their own ancestors. These Cushitic former residents are remembered by a variety of often interchanging names, including the "Bisha", "Sikimi", "Nyamba" and "Wasi".

Notes

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References

*Ehret, Christopher and Nurse, Derek (1981). "The Taita Cushites". ''Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika 3''. *Merritt, E. H. (1975). "A History of the Taita of Kenya to 1900". PhD Dissertation, Department of History, Indiana University. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms. South Cushitic languages Languages extinct in the 19th century