South Cushitic languages

Branch of the Cushitic languages of Tanzania

South Cushitic

Rift, Greater Rift
Geographic
distribution| Tanzania
Linguistic classification| Afro-Asiatic

* Cushitic
* South Cushitic

Subdivisions|

* Rift
* Taita Cushitic †

Language codes
Glottolog| `sout3054`

The South Cushitic or Rift languages of Tanzania are a branch of the Cushitic languages. The most numerous is Iraqw, with one million speakers. Scholars believe that these languages were spoken by Southern Cushitic agro-pastoralists from Ethiopia, who began migrating southward into the Great Rift Valley in the third millennium BC.[1]

## History

[edit]

The original homeland of Proto-South-Cushitic was in southwestern Ethiopia. South Cushitic speakers then migrated south to Lake Turkana in northern Kenya by 3000 BC and further south, entering northern Tanzania in 2000 BC.[2][3][4] The speakers of South Cushitic were likely the first peoples to introduce agriculture and pastoralism in the lands east of Lake Victoria. Being the only agriculturalists and pastoralists, they faced no competition and spread rapidly throughout southern East Africa.[5]

As the speakers of South Cushitic rapidly spread throughout Kenya and Tanzania, they encountered hunter-gatherer peoples who preceded them and whom they assimilated and were influenced by (as seen by the loanwords of hunter-gatherer origin found in the South Cushitic languages).[6]

> The hunter-gatherers who preceded the Southern Cushites in East Africa were not without effect on their successors. The proto-Southern Cushitic community itself must have consisted in large part of descendants of hunter-gatherers who had been assimilated culturally and linguistically by the immigrant agriculturists. And some hunter-gatherers who later adopted Southern Cushitic languages as their own nevertheless maintained their old ways and remained food-gatherers in economy. The Dahalo, Southern Cushitic-speakers of eastern Kenya, are often still today hunters, as are also the Aramanik of Masailand.

[7]

There was a now extinct sister branch to South Cushitic called "Para-Southern Cushitic". The Para-Southern Cushitic languages were once spoken in the Eastern Equatoria region of South Sudan and the Karamoja region of northeastern Uganda before being absorbed by Kuliak, Nilotic and Surmic speakers.[8]

## Classification

[edit]

The Rift languages are named after the Great Rift Valley 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 influenced through contact with Khoisan languages, as perhaps evidenced by the unusually high frequency of the ejective affricates /tsʼ/ and /tɬʼ/, which outnumber pulmonary consonants like /p, f, w, ɬ, x/. 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 and Degere may once have spoken languages similar to Dahalo.) He deems Kw'adza and Aasax in turn insufficiently described to classify as even Cushitic with any certainty.[9]

Rift |

| West Rift  |

| North  |

| Iraqwoid  |

|  |

Gorowa

|

Iraqw

Alagwa

South  |

Burunge

? East Rift  |

|  |

Aasáx (extinct)

|

Kw'adza (extinct)

Iraqw and Gorowa are close enough for basic mutual intelligibility. 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, maybe the result 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.[10] Two of these, Taita Cushitic, appear to have been more distinct from the current Rift languages than other related languages. They are similar to an earlier form of Rift, which Nurse (1988) calls "Greater Rift".[11]

There was a now-extinct member of the West Rift branch of South Cushitic that Christopher Ehret named "Tale" (pronounced Tah-lay), and Derek Nurse called it simply "West Rift southern Cushites." The Tale Southern Cushites originated south of the Grumeti River in the Mara region and then expanded westward across the Mara plain, stretching their territory across north-central Tanzania (avoiding the lowlands of the southern and western lakeshore and making use of ecological zones suitable for their pastoralism south of Lake Victoria) and then expanded north into the Kagera Region, following both banks of the Kagera river until the southern side of the Kagera River became their northern boundary. The Tale peoples spoke 7 or more different dialects of their languages.[12][13][14][15][16][17]

The Iringa Southern Cushites are another extinct South Cushitic branch that migrated to the northern parts of Tanzania's southern highlands before the first millennium AD. They are named after the Iringa Region of Tanzania.[18]

## Notes

[edit]

1. ^ Derek Nurse, Thomas T. Spear (1985). The Swahili: Reconstructing the History and Language of an African Society, 800-1500. University of Pennsylvania Press. p. 34\. ISBN 081221207X.
2. ^ Isichei, Elizabeth (13 April 1997). A History of African Societies to 1870. Cambridge University Press. p. 125\. ISBN 9780521455992.
3. ^ Clark, John Desmond; Brandt, Steven A. (January 1984). From Hunters to Farmers: The Causes and Consequences of Food Production in Africa. University of California Press. ISBN 9780520045743.
4. ^ Elfasi, M.; Hrbek, Ivan (January 1988). Africa from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century. University of California Press. p. 616\. ISBN 9789231017094.
5. ^ Ethiopians and East Africans: The Problem of Contacts. East African Publishing House. 1974. p. 8.
6. ^ Ethiopians and East Africans: The Problem of Contacts. East African Publishing House. 1974. p. 8.
7. ^ Ethiopians and East Africans: The Problem of Contacts. East African Publishing House. 1974. p. 8-9.
8. ^ Culture History in the Southern Sudan: Archaeology, Linguistics and Ethnohistory. p. 21, 28-41.
9. ^ Roland Kießling, "South Cushitic links to East Cushitic", in Zaborski ed, 2001, New Data and New Methods in Afroasiatic Linguistics
10. ^ Gabriele Sommer (1992). "A survey of language death in Africa". In Matthias Brenzinger (ed.). Language Death: Factual and Theoretical Explorations with Special Reference to East Africa. Walter de Gruyter. pp. 392–394\. ISBN 3110870606.
11. ^ Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst (1988). Fritz Serzisko (ed.). Cushitic-Omotic: Papers from the International Symposium on Cushitic and Omotic Languages, Cologne, January 6-9, 1986. Buske Verlag. pp. 95 & 99\. ISBN 3871188905.
12. ^ Origins of Kingship Traditions and Symbolism in the Great Lakes Region of Africa. Uppsala universitet. 2008. p. 75-76. ISBN 978-91-554-7295-5.
13. ^ Schoenbrun, David L. (1993). "We Are What We Eat: Ancient Agriculture between the Great Lakes". The Journal of African History. 34 (1): 15–17\. doi:10.1017/S0021853700032989. JSTOR 183030. S2CID 162660041.
14. ^ An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History, 1000 B.C. to A.D. 400. University Press of Virginia. 1998. p. 62, 85-86, 97, 286. ISBN 978-0-8139-2057-3.
15. ^ Derek Nurse (1988). "Extinct Southern Cushitic Communities". Cushitic-Omotic: Papers from the International Symposium on Cushitic and Omotic Languages, Cologne, January 6-9, 1986. pp. 93–104\. ISBN 978-3-87118-890-9.
16. ^ Peter Robertshaw (22 May 2014). "The beginnings of food production in southwestern Kenya". The Archaeology of Africa: Food, Metals and Towns. pp. 358–370\. ISBN 978-1-134-67949-2.
17. ^ Ethiopians and East Africans: The Problem of Contacts. East African Publishing House. 1974. p. 24-27.
18. ^ An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History, 1000 B.C. to A.D. 400. University Press of Virginia. 1998. p. 192\. ISBN 978-0-8139-2057-3.

## References

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* 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 & Ludwig Gerhardt. 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)
* Mous, Maarten (2003). The Making of a Mixed Language: The Case of Ma'a/Mbugu.

## External links

[edit]

* Was there ever a Southern Cushitic Language (Pre-)Ma'a?

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Cushitic languages

Central|

* Awngi

North|

* Kayla
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East|

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East|

| Highland|

* Burji

Sidamoid|

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|

Kambaataic|

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Lowland|

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Somali languages/language|

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Others|

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Eastern|

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Konsoid|

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Dullay|

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Saho–Afar|

* Afar
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Others|

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North|

* Blemmyan
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South|

* Taita Cushitic

Rift|

| East|

* Asa
* Kwʼadza

|

West|

* Burunge

North|

* Alagwa

Iraqwoid|

* Gorowa
* Iraqw

Others|

* Maʼa

Italics indicate extinct languages

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