South Cushitic languages

Infobox Language family
name=South Cushitic
altname=Rift
region=Tanzania
familycolor=Afro-Asiatic
fam1=Afro-Asiatic
fam2=Cushitic
child1=Aasáx
child2=Alagwa
child3=Burunge
child4=? Dahalo
child5=Gorowa
child6=Iraqw
child7=Kw'adza

The South Cushitic or Rift languages belong to the Afro-Asiatic family and are spoken in Tanzania. The Kw'adza language is extinct. [Raymond G. Gordon, Jr, ed. 2005. "Ethnologue: Languages of the World". 15th edition. Dallas: Summer Institute of Linguistics.]

The mixed language Mbugu (Ma'a) is partially derived from a South Cushitic language. The click language Dahalo is divergent, and shows traces of language shift to Cushitic from something else, but is arguably in the South Cushitic branch.

Hetzron (1980:70ff) and Ehret (1995) have suggested that the Rift languages "(South Cushitic)" are a part of Lowland East Cushitic. Kießling and Mous (2003:37) note that the necessary reconstructions are not present to ensure that these are not loans, and the great lexical divergence of Rift from that family is problematic for this scenario. However, it is possible that Rift was partially relexified through contact with Khoisan languages, as perhaps evidenced by the unusually high frequency of the ejective affricates IPA|/ts’/ and IPA|/tɬ’/, which outnumber pulmonary consonants like IPA|/p, f, w, ɬ, x/. They suggest that these ejectives may be remnants of clicks from the source language.

Notes

References

*BLAŽEK, Václav. 2005. Current progress in South Cushitic Comparative Historical Linguistics. Folia Orientalia 42, no. 1, pp. 177-224. (Poland. ISSN 0015-5675)
* Ehret, Christopher. 1980. "The Historical Reconstruction of Southern Cushitic Phonology and Vocabulary". (Kolner Beitrage zur Afrikanistik). Reimer Verlag.
*Kiessling, Roland. 1995. Verbal Inflectional Suffixes in the West Rift Group of Southern Cushitic. In: Cushitic and Omotic Languages, ed. by C. Griefenow-Mewis und R. M. Voigt. Köln, 59-70.
*Kiessling, Roland. 2000. Some salient features of Southern Cushitic (Common West Rift). Lingua Posnaniensis 42: 69-89
*Kiessling, Roland. 2001. South Cushitic links to East Cushitic. In: New Data and New Methods in Afroasiatic Linguistics - Robert Hetzron in memoriam; ed. by Andrzej Zaborski. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 95-102.
*Kiessling, Roland. 2002. Wille, Initiierung und Kontrolle: zur Morphosemantik von Experiensverben im Südkuschitischen. In: Aktuelle Forschungen zu afrikanischen Sprachen (Tagungsband des 14. Afrikanistentags), ed by Theda Schumann, Mechthild Reh, Roland Kießling & Ludwig Gerhardt. Köln: Rüdiger Köppe, 171-192.
*Kiessling, Roland. 2003. Infix genesis in Southern Cushitic. In: Selected Comparative-Historical Afrasian Linguistic Studies in memory of Igor M. Diakonoff; hrsg. v. Lionel M. Bender, Gabor Takacs & David Appleyard. München: Lincom, 109-122.
*Kiessling, Roland. 2004. Tonogenesis in Southern Cushitic (Common West Rift). In: Stress and Tone – the African Experience, edited by Rose-Juliet Anyanwu. Frankfurter Afrikanistische Blätter 15: 141-163.
*Roland Kießling and Maarten Mous. 2003. "The Lexical Reconstruction of West-Rift (Southern Cushitic)"

Websites

* [http://www.ethnologue.org/show_family.asp?subid=90112 Ethnologue entry for South Cushitic languages]
* "Was there ever a Southern Cushitic Language (Pre-)Ma'a?", https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/2734