East Cushitic

East Cushitic is the largest branch of the Cushitic family and, through it, of the Afroasiatic phylum, spread across the Horn of Africa from the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden to the Ethiopian highlands and northern Kenya. It splits into Highland languages and the Lowland group, which includes Oromo and Somali.

In the fourteenth century the Somali-speaking Ifat and Adal sultanates dominated the trade routes between the Ethiopian highlands and the sea. The Ethiopian-Adal war of 1529 to 1543 exhausted both sides, and from about 1530 Oromo pastoralists, organized under their eight-year gadaa cycle, began expanding north, carrying Oromo across much of central Ethiopia.

Somali and Afar turned increasingly to Islam and Arabic letters, while the Highland East Cushitic peoples kept their place within the Christian Ethiopian orbit, their languages alive south of the Blue Nile.