Cushitic-speaking peoples

The Cushitic-speaking peoples are the many nations and communities whose mother tongue belongs to the Cushitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family. Most live in the Horn of Africa, in Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Djibouti and northern Kenya, with smaller groups in Sudan, south-eastern Egypt and Tanzania. They are not a single people but a family of related languages spoken by tens of millions, among them the Oromo, Somalis, Afar, Beja and Sidama.

Cushitic, a name first given to the group in 1858, is one of the branches of the Afroasiatic family. It is traditionally divided into North Cushitic (Beja alone), Central Cushitic (the Agaw languages) and the large East Cushitic group, split into Lowland and Highland branches; Joseph Greenberg argued in 1950 for adding South Cushitic, spoken in Tanzania. The Omotic languages, once counted as West Cushitic, are now almost universally treated as separate. Many Cushitic languages share features such as pitch accent, two grammatical genders and a rare pattern in which the subject, rather than the object, carries a special case ending.

When and where Cushitic began is debated. Donald Levine argued that Proto-Cushitic was spoken in the Ethiopian Highlands by 5000 to 4000 BCE, while Christopher Ehret places a unified Proto-Cushitic in the Red Sea Hills as early as the early Holocene. Roger Blench has suggested that Cushitic speakers made the "Leiterband" pottery of the eastern Sahara, but Erik Becker, who studied skeletons from Leiterband sites in the Wadi Howar, judged that link improbable. The spread of South Cushitic into the East African Rift Valley is commonly linked to the herders of the Savanna Pastoral Neolithic.

In the north, many historians regard the Medjay of Egyptian records and the later Blemmyes as ancestors of today's Beja, and a language ancestral to Beja appears to have been spoken near the Nile by the time of Egypt's Twelfth Dynasty. Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst has argued that when Nubian speakers reached the Nile around 1500 BCE, they borrowed many livestock words from Cushitic neighbours, apparently speakers of an East Cushitic language. Blench also proposes that a now-vanished Cushitic language, replaced during the Bantu expansion, may lie behind some of the herding traditions of the Khoekhoe in southern Africa, a hypothesis resting on very little vocabulary.

Among the largest Cushitic languages, according to recent estimates, are Oromo (about 45.5 million speakers), Somali (about 24 million), Sidama (about 4.9 million), Beja and Afar (each about 2.6 to 2.8 million). Oromo, the language of the Oromo, is one of the working languages of Ethiopia's federal government, and Somali is an official language of Somalia. Other Cushitic-speaking peoples include the Afar and Saho of the Red Sea coast, the Hadiya, Kambaata and Gedeo of southern Ethiopia, the Rendille and Daasanach of northern Kenya, the Beja of Sudan and Eritrea, and the Agaw peoples of the Ethiopian highlands, including the Bilen and Qemant. The Iraqw of Tanzania speak a South Cushitic language.

Language shift has affected some smaller communities: most El Molo in Kenya no longer speak a Cushitic language, and the Yaaku language is no longer spoken as a mother tongue, though a revival effort exists. Elsewhere Cushitic languages are gaining official roles, and Beja, Afar, Bilen and Saho are taught in Eritrean primary schools.

The maps label this area "Cushites" and draw it only on the 900 map, covering parts of today's Somalia and Ethiopia. The outline is a rough indication of where Cushitic speakers lived, not a political border, and many Cushitic-speaking peoples lay outside it.