Highland East Cushitic Languages

Abstract

Highland East Cushitic (HEC) is a group of five languages with some nine named dialects in south-central Ethiopia: from north to south Hadiyya, Kambaata, Sidaama, Gedeo, and Burji. Neighbor to Semitic and Omotic languages, HEC speakers are some 5.5 million people. HEC languages are consistently head-final and inflectional, with glottalic ejective stops, implosive d, long consonants and vowels, and productive n-metathesis in verb formation. Verbs have regular causative, passive, and reflexive derivatives. Nominative case is marked, and the singular as well as plural of nouns. Sidaama marks gender in first person, and has gender exclusive vocabulary. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.