South Cushitic languages

The South Cushitic or Rift languages of Tanzania are a branch of the Cushitic languages. The most numerous is Iraqw, with 600,000 speakers. Scholars believe that these languages were spoken by Southern Cushitic agro-pastoralists from Ethiopia, who began migrating southward into the Great Rift Valley in the third millennium BC.

History

The original homeland of Proto-South-Cushitic was in southwestern Ethiopia. South Cushitic speakers then migrated south to Lake Turkana in northern Kenya by 3000 BC and further south, entering northern Tanzania in 2000 BC. The speakers of South Cushitic were likely the first peoples to introduce agriculture and pastoralism in the lands east of Lake Victoria. Being the only agriculturalists and pastoralists, they faced no competition and spread rapidly throughout southern East Africa.

As the speakers of South Cushitic rapidly spread throughout Kenya and Tanzania, they encountered hunter-gatherer peoples who preceded them and whom they assimilated and were influenced by (as seen by the loanwords of hunter-gatherer origin found in the South Cushitic languages).

The hunter-gatherers who preceded the Southern Cushites in East Africa were not without effect on their successors. The proto-Southern Cushitic community itself must have consisted in large part of descendants of hunter-gatherers who had been assimilated culturally and linguistically by the immigrant agriculturists. And some hunter-gatherers who later adopted Southern Cushitic languages as their own nevertheless maintained their old ways and remained food-gatherers in economy. The Dahalo, Southern Cushitic-speakers of eastern Kenya, are often still today hunters, as are also the Aramanik of Masailand.