Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2008
Gurage is a cover-term for a dozen south Ethiopian-Semitic tongues spoken by some half-a-million people in a small and compact area about 70 miles south-southwest of Addis Ababa bounded to the north by the Awash River, to the east by Lake Zway, and to the south and west by the Omo River. Completely surrounded by Cushitic languages, especially Galla and Sidamo, Gurage forms, as it were, a tiny Semitic island floating in a vast Cushitic sea. The variety, diversity, and fragmentation of tongues in such a small area, 100 miles at its broadest and widest, is puzzling and problematic, not least because Gurage represents the highest concentration of linguistic diversity attested in the Semitic world. A satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon has not yet been offered, and unless and until further data, both synchronic and diachronic, becomes available, this short note will have to suffice, for better or for worse.
1 Basic bibliographical information, although now perhaps somewhat dated, may be found in Leslau, Wolf, ‘Ethiopic and South Arabian’, in Sebeok, T. A. (ed.), Current Trends in Linguistics 6 (The Hague, 1970). pp. 467–527.Google Scholar
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.