smaller endangered languages including those of the Falashas, the Ethiopian Jews; the

Cushitic Maarten Mous 1. Geographical distribution and speakers The Cushitic family consists of more than thirty languages spoken in Northeastern and Eastern Africa. Ethnologue (Gordon 2005) mentions forty-seven languages because it distinguishes six Oromo languages and six Somali languages. do not include the mixed language Ma'a/Mbugu in this overview. This is a language classified as (South) Cushitic on the basis of its lexicon and its historical origin. The people once spoke a Cushitic language, shifted to a Bantu language and tried to shift back by creating a parallel lexicon with root forms from their original language, from Maasai, from Gorwa and from their dominant Bantu language but manipulated in form; see Mous (2003). Regardless of one's views on classification of this mixed language, typologically the language is Bantu. There is a separate chapter on Omotic languages. Omotic is not taken to be part of Cushitic, as it is in some proposals for classification. This does not reflect a point of view on the part of this author, who actually has no opinion on this issue. The separation of Omotic and Cushitic makes the writing of the respective chapters definitely more manageable. The debate on the classification of Omotic is dealt with in the chapter on Omotic. Many variants of language names exist in the literature. Only the most common ones that may lead to confusion are given here with the variant that is used in this paper first: The northernmost and easternmost language is Beja, spoken in Sudan and Eritrea. See map 1Other Cushitic languages spoken in Eritrea are Saho and Bilin; and in Djibouti, Afar. The bulk of the Cushitic languages are spoken in Ethiopia. According to calculations by the Moscow school of glottochronology and long-range comparison, the time-depth of Cushitic is deeper than that of any other branch of Afroasiatic (Militariev 2005). Despite this time-depth, the Cushitic languages are typologically relatively homogeneous. In the main Cushitic-speaking area, the languages are in contact mainly with other related languages, Cushitic or Ethio-Semitic. In the more southern areas, the languages are, and have been, in contact with unrelated languages, mainly Bantu and Nilotic. There must have been intensive contacts between Cushitic languages and Nilotic languages at several points in time and space. In fact, Heine et al. (1979) postulated a now-extinct Cushitic language, proto-Baz, on the basis of loan words in Nilotic languages, and similarly now-extinct Cushitic languages have been hypothesized …