Blackwell Reference Online

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There are about 70 Ethiopian languages (Bender et al., 1976, pp. 10–16), and most of these are spoken in a 100,000 square-mile area of the Ethiopian south-central highlands, so each language averages a territory of only some 2,000 square miles. Ethiopia is the eastern edge of the linguistic “fragmentation belt” (Dalby 1970, p. 162) which extends, only about 700 miles in width, across the breadth of Africa south of the Sahara desert. Despite the number and diversity of languages, Charles Ferguson identified Ethiopia as a “linguistic area,” most languages of which “tend to share a number of features which, taken together, distinguish them from any other geographically defined group of languages in the world” (Ferguson 1976, pp. 63–64). Their rather rich inflectional systems and, in the case of the Semitic languages, their root and pattern morphologies, the presence of neighboring and closely related languages and, again in the case of the Semitic languages, a long written record, typically make possible thorough testing of synchronic phonological hypotheses against considerable evidence from internal and comparative reconstruction. Discussion in this paper will concern the phonology of two families of Afroasiatic languages well represented in Ethiopia: Semitic and Cushitic. There are good bibliographies of the literature on these languages, very complete at the time of their publication: ... log in or subscribe to read full text