Gurage: the Last Straw

Extract

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.