Highland East Cushitic or Burji-Sidamo is a branch of the Afroasiatic language family spoken in south-central Ethiopia. They are often grouped with Lowland East Cushitic, Dullay, and Yaaku as East Cushitic. The most popular language is Sidama, with close to two million speakers.
The languages are:
Burji (divergent) Sidamoid (also Sidamic) Sidama Gedeo Hadiyya–Libido Kambaata–Alaba
The four to six Sidamoid languages are all closely related. Hadiyya and Libido are especially close, as are Kambaata and Alaba. Their relationship with Burji is more distant and was first proposed in 1940; it has been accepted widely but not universally.
Language contact The Highland East Cushitic languages show parallels in their phonology to the historical development of the southern Ethio-Semitic languages, in particular those of the Gurage group, and may have influenced their development.Leslau, Wolf. "Sidamo Features in the South Ethiopic Phonology." "Journal of the American Oriental Society," 1959.
Notes
References Hudson, Grover. 1981. The Highland East Cushitic family vine. Sprache und Geschichte in Afrika 3.97-124. Hudson, Grover. 1988. The Highland Cushitic hypothesis. Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies (Addis Ababa, 1984), Taddese Beyene, ed., 693-696. Birmingham, England: Elm Press.
Hudson, Grover. 2005. Highland East Cushitic languages, Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd ed., Keith Brown, ed., 294-298. Elsevier: Oxford. Hudson, Grover. 2007a. Highland East Cushitic morphology, Morphologies of Asian and African Languages, vol. 1, Alan S. Kaye, ed., 529-545. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns. Sasse, Hans-Jürgen. 1979. The consonant phonemes of Proto-East-Cushitic (PEC): A first approximation. Malibu: Undena Publications. Wedekind, Klaus. 1980. Sidamo, Gedeo (Derasa), Burji: Phonological differences and likenesses. Journal of Ethiopian Studies 14: 131-76.