CUSHITIC LANGUAGES

group of languages spoken by some 16 million people in Ethiopia and adjacent areas south and east and compromising one of the five branches of the Afro-Asiatic (formerly Hamito-Semitic) language family. (The other branches are Egyptian, Berber, Chadic, and Semitic.) Scholars differentiate five Cushitic subgroups: (1) Beja, (2) Agau, (3) Eastern Cushitic (including Oromo and Somali), (4) West Cushitic (including Kaffa in southwest Ethiopia), and (5) Southern Cushitic (including Mbugu and Mbulunge in Tanzania). The most widespread languages are Oromo, Somali, and Beja. Because West Cushitic has few vocabulary items in common with the other Cushitic languages, some scholars consider it to be a separate (or sixth) branch, called Omotic, of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Igor Mikhailovich Diakonoff Additional reading M.L. Bender, The Languages of Ethiopia: A New Lexicostatistic Classification and Some Problems of Diffusion, Anthropological Linguistics, vol. 13 (1971); A.B. Dolgopol'skij, Sravitel'no-istoricheskaja fonetika kuitskikh jazykov (1973); on the individual branches and languages of Cushitic, see C.R. Bell, The Somali Language (1953), a manual of the Isaq dialect; M.M. Moreno, Il somalo della Somalia (1955), devoted to the Benadir, Darod, and Digil dialects; Enrico Cerulli, Studi etiopici, 4 vol. (193651), contains grammars and vocabularies of Sidamo, Janjero, some Ometo dialects, and Kafa (Kaficho). For a good survey of the individual branches and languages of Cushitic, see F.R. Palmer, Cushitic, in Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), Current Trends in Linguistics, vol. 6 (1970), pp. 571585. Igor Mikhailovich Diakonoff