Cushitic languages

Cushitic languages, a division of the Afro-Asiatic phylum, comprising about 40 languages that are spoken mainly in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, and northwestern Kenya. There are six major subdivisions within the Cushitic family: North Cushitic, or Beja; Central Cushitic (also known as Agau [Agaw, Agew]), with languages such as Bilin, Kemant, Kwara, Xamtage, and Awngi; South Cushitic (spoken mainly in Tanzania), including Iraqw, Burunge, and Gorowa, the hybrid language Maʾa/Mbugu, and (in Kenya) Dahalo; Highland East Cushitic, including Burji, Sidamo, Kambata, and Hadiyya; Lowland East Cushitic, including Dasenech, Arbore, Saho-Afar, and Oromo and its close relatives such as Konso; and the Omo-Tana group, with languages such as Somali, Rendille, and Boni.

The most widely spoken languages are Oromo (approximately 20 million speakers), Sidamo (some 3 million speakers), and Hadiyya (more than 1 million speakers) in southern Ethiopia; Somali, the official language of Somalia, with about 15 million speakers; and Saho-Afar, two closely related languages, spoken by more than 1 million people in Djibouti and adjacent areas. Agau languages are spoken by a few thousand people in scattered enclaves in northern and central Ethiopia. South Cushitic languages are spoken mainly in central Tanzania.

Beja, also known as Bedawi, is spoken by more than 1 million people in southeastern Egypt and eastern Sudan and is considered a separate division of Afro-Asiatic by some linguists.

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Languages & Alphabets

Phonetics and phonology

The various languages in the Cushitic family contain diverse sets of consonants. A variety of glottalized consonants (i.e., consonants that are articulated through various types of air pressure in the mouth, depending on the upward or downward movement of the glottis) are widely used, including those that are ejective (articulated on the egressive airstream), implosive (articulated on the ingressive airstream), retroflex (formed with the tongue curled backward and touching the roof of the mouth), and uvular (pronounced with the back of the tongue raised against the uvula). The pharyngeal consonants ḥ and ʿ (“ayn”) are articulated at the back of the mouth with the root of the tongue moving toward the back wall of the pharynx. They are also fairly common, although certain languages, such as Agau, do not use them at all. Rounded velar consonants (in which the back of the tongue touches the soft palate and the lips are rounded simultaneously) are also common in Cushitic languages, although they are absent in the East Cushitic subdivisions.

Most languages have five vowels (i, e, a, o, u), which are further distinguished by different vowel lengths (long and short). Some languages, such as Agau, Somali, and Boni (Kenya), distinguish between tense and lax vowels, which may result in a vowel harmony system such as the one found in Somali (in vowel harmony systems, certain qualities must match across all of a word’s vowels, thereby restricting possible vowel sequences).

Cushitic languages are often described as tonal, meaning that they incorporate two (high and low) or sometimes three (high, middle, and low) pitches to distinguish among words that are otherwise identical; contrast this to the use of intonation (as in English), in which meaning is provided by pitch changes (rising, falling) that occur across the sentence as a whole. There is, however, some question as to whether at least some Cushitic languages would be better described as having pitch-accent rather than tone systems; the difference is a matter of language typology based on the nature of the phonological rules needed for adequate grammatical description. Notably, languages may change “type” in the course of their history.

Morphology and grammar

Nouns distinguish grammatical cases, of which there may originally have been only two: absolutive and nominative. Nouns also indicate number and gender (masculine and feminine, often semantically re-arranged in terms of augmentative and diminutive). Plural formatives are plentiful. Some Cushitic languages, such as Somali and Rendille (Kenya), also have a feature known as “gender polarity,” in which some nouns have one gender in the singular and another in the plural.

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Verbal morphology is complex and is not uniform. New verbs may be formed by adding affixes, which may occur in combination with each other. Affixes can indicate whether a verb is passive, causative, or reflexive, among other things. To denote repeated action, the verb stem (or parts of it) may be reduplicated.

A root and pattern system is common in the Afro-Asiatic phylum; stems made up of consonants (the root) provide a word with its basic lexical meaning, while the vowel sequence within the word (the pattern)—sometimes involving the addition of prefixes—denotes grammatical categories such as number, mood, aspect, and tense. This system is evident in archaic and some living Cushitic languages, as in Somali, where the forms na-qaan ‘we know/we will know’ or ni-qiin ‘we knew’ are based on the root n-q--n.

Subject marking by prefixed pronouns survived as a regular pattern in Beja and Saho-Afar; elsewhere it is limited to certain verbs or is lost completely, as in South Cushitic. Usually another conjugational pattern prevails, in which prefix-conjugated auxiliaries are postponed to the main verb, creating a pseudo-suffixal conjugation type, as in Oromo tum-na ‘we forge’ and tum-ne ‘we forged.’ East and South Cushitic languages typically display “selectors” (also referred to as “preverbal clitic clusters”); these are highly complex units that anticipate inflectional categories of the following verb. In South Cushitic Burunge, for instance, “selectors” provide up to eight functional slots to mark grammatical categories such as clause type (e.g., conditional, concessive, subject focus, or relative), case (e.g., comitative, instrumental), oblique relative, oblique case focus, tense (e.g., preterite, habitual), sequence, and direction of action. For example, in the Burunge clause

ʾana |atiyoo haguróo fa|a |agima

(first person singular subject + spoon + “selector” + broth + eat-first person singular-imperfective)

‘I used to eat the broth with (a) spoon’

the “selector” haguróo (from *ha-gu-ri-óo; the asterisk denotes a hypothetical reconstruction of an earlier form) comprises the non-third person subject ha; the third person singular, masculine object gu; the comitative case ri; and the habitual tense óo.

Morphophonemic processes such as assimilation, elision, and fusion may change the resulting phonetic form considerably, as in the case of the Burunge selector lugoo (from *la-hi-gu-oo, comprising an optative clause + third person singular subject + second person singular masculine object + prospective tense).

The usual word order is subject–object–verb (SOV). However, practically any constituent of the sentence can be made prominent by one means or another, including changes of constituent order.