Lowland East Cushitic languages
| Lowland East Cushitic | |
|---|---|
| Geographic distribution |
Horn of Africa |
| Linguistic classification |
Afro-Asiatic
|
| Subdivisions |
|
| Glottolog | lowl1267 |
Lowland East Cushitic is a group of roughly two dozen diverse languages of the Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family. They are spoken mainly in Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia, and by many groups in northern Kenya.
Lowland East Cushitic is often grouped with Highland East Cushitic (the Sidamic languages), Dullay, and Yaaku as East Cushitic, but that group is not well defined and considered dubious.
The most prominent Lowland East Cushitic language is Oromo, with about 35 million speakers in Ethiopia and Kenya. The Konsoid dialect cluster is closely related to Oromo. Other prominent languages include Somali (spoken by ethnic Somalis in Somalia, Ethiopia, Yemen, Djibouti, and Kenya) with about 15 million speakers, and Afar (in Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti) with about 1.5 million.
Robert Hetzron has suggested that the Rift languages (South Cushitic) are a part of Lowland East Cushitic, and Kießling & Mous (2003) have suggested more specifically that they be linked to a Southern Lowland branch, together with Oromo, Somali, and Yaaku–Dullay.
The vocabulary of the mixed register of Mbugu (Ma'a) may also be East Cushitic (Tosco 2002), though the grammatical basis and the other register are Bantu.
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