South Cushitic languages

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]

South Cushitic
Rift, Greater Rift
Geographic distribution	Tanzania
Linguistic classification	Afro-Asiatic Cushitic South Cushitic
Subdivisions	Rift Taita Cushitic †
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
Glottolog	sout3054

History

The original homeland of Proto-South Cushitic was in southwestern Ethiopia. South Cushitic speakers then migrated south to lake Turkana in northern Kenya by 3,000BC and further south, entering northern Tanzania in 2000 BC.^[2][3][4]

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, Southern Nilotic and Surmic speakers.^[5]

Classification

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.^[6]

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.^[7] 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".^[8]

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 3 or more different dialects of their languages.^{[9][10][11][12][13][14]}

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.^[15]