South Cushitic

The South Cushitic, or Rift, languages form a branch of the Cushitic family surviving mainly in the Great Rift Valley of northern Tanzania. Their speakers descend from agro-pastoralists whose proto-language was home in south-western Ethiopia; they entered northern Tanzania early in the second millennium BC, introducing agriculture and cattle-keeping east of Lake Victoria.

Long contact with Khoisan hunter-gatherers left click-like ejective consonants in several Rift languages. As Bantu and then Nilotic peoples spread, most South Cushitic communities were absorbed; some tongues are known only from loanwords in the Bantu languages that replaced them. The surviving languages include Iraqw, the largest, in the highlands.

Iraqw tradition credits its ancestors with the stone-walled irrigation complex at Engaruka, abandoned around 1700 to 1750 amid pressure from Datog and Maasai herders. The Iraqw then withdrew to the intensive farming country of the Mbulu highlands.