• Source: East Cushitic languages

      • The East Cushitic languages are a branch of Cushitic within the Afroasiatic phylum. Prominent East Cushitic languages include Oromo, Somali, and Sidama. The unity of East Cushitic has been contested: Robert Hetzron suggested combining the Highland East Cushitic languages with the Agaw languages into a "Highland Cushitic" branch, while most other scholars follow Martino Mario Moreno in seeing Highland and Lowland as two branches of East Cushitic.


      Classification


      Clearly distinct subgroups within East Cushitic are Highland East Cushitic (including Sidama and Hadiyya), Oromoid (including Oromo and Konso), Omo-Tana (including Somali), Dullay, and Saho-Afar. A number of tree models of how these relate to each other have been put forward. Highland East Cushitic is commonly seen as a primary branch, also in the "traditional" or "classical" view which groups Yaaku with Dullay and groups the rest as Lowland East Cushitic. With the addition of Dahalo, formerly considered to belong to South Cushitic, this classification is also followed by David Appleyard:

      An influential alternative classification was put forward by Mauro Tosco. His 2000 proposal groups Yaaku and Dullay with part of Lowland and replaces them with all of South Cushitic as the fourth daughter branch of East Cushitic:

      Tosco's revised 2020 classification leaves the disputed Dahalo and South Cushitic languages out of consideration, leaving a binary split between Highland and Lowland (although he states that this is negatively defined and could also be seen as separate branches of East Cushitic):

      Finally, Lionel Bender's posthumous 2019 classification also places Dahalo outside East Cushitic, making it a primary branch of Cushitic as also suggested by Kießling and Mous. Yaaku is not listed, being placed within Arboroid. Afar–Saho is removed from Lowland East Cushitic; since they are the most 'lowland' of the Cushitic languages, Bender calls the remnant 'core' East Cushitic.


      Morphology




      = Verb

      =
      As in most other branches of Cushitic, the majority of East Cushitic verbs mark their subject agreement and tense–aspect–mood information with suffixes. A typically East Cushitic feature is the threefold distinction between imperfective, perfective, and jussive forms, marked by a changing vowel. This is most clearly seen in Lowland languages like Oromo, but also recognizable in Highland languages like Sidamo:


      Lexicon


      The East Cushitic languages share a sizeable amount of basic vocabulary inherited from Proto-East-Cushitic, such as the following:


      References

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