Cushitic * David Appleyard, SOAS, London 1 Overview 1.1 Introductory remarks There are just over 30 Cushitic languages, more if different varieties of langua- ges such as Oromo and Somali or members of dialect chains such as Konso or Dullay are counted separately. These 30+ languages are divided into four dis- tinct branches broadly named after their geographical location across the Horn of Africa as North, Central, East and South. The present-day focus or epicentre of the Cushitic languages is the area of the four countries: Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethi- opia and Somalia. Outside this region, one language, Beja, is also spoken in Sudan and southern Egypt, and of the others, Somali and Oromo extend into Kenya and a few smaller languages, all belonging to the South Cushitic branch, are found in Tanzania. In terms of numbers of speakers many Cushitic languages are comparative- ly small, with a few thousands, tens of thousands or occasionally hundreds of thousands of speakers, and in a few instances with only a few hundred or less. Although available figures are not always reliable in respect of exact numbers, the only Cushitic languages with a million or more speakers are ʿAfar (c. 1 million), Beja (c. 1.2 million), Oromo (at least 18 million, counting all varie- ties, thus making it the largest Cushitic language), Sidaama (c. 2.9 million), and Somali (around 13 million). There are no pre-modern records of Cushitic lan- guages, aside from occasional words and proper names, the earliest textual at- testations being in the first instance extracts from the Song of Songs translated at the behest of the Scottish traveller, James Bruce, in the late 18 th cent., and later some Agäw (Central Cushitic) prayer texts written in Ethiopic script that pro- bably date from the mid 19 th cent. Otherwise, until orthographies were develop- ed for some languages towards the end of the 20 th cent., all prior attestations de- rive from language studies made by foreign travellers, missionaries and scho- lars from the middle of the 19 th cent. onwards. Some languages remained un- known to scholarship until the second half of the 20 th cent. In contrast to other * The section on Sidaama (pp. 262–277) is by Kjell Magne Yri, University of Oslo.