Unravelling East Africa's early linguistic history

Unravelling East Africa’s Early Linguistic History is a research project that aims to reconstruct the earliest possible linguistic history of East Africa with focus on Tanzania and Kenya and to provide a comprehensive overview of its linguistic history in the last five thousand years. In the traditional view, East Africa was populated by KhoiSan speaking hunter-gatherer communities before successive populations of Cushitic, Bantu, and Nilotic people moved in, bringing agriculture, animal husbandry, and iron. Recent advances in archaeology show a more complex picture. Also, genetic studies have become available, including studies on ancient human and cattle DNA. Furthermore, historical linguists no longer consider the various East African Khoi-San languages as related to each other. It is therefore time to fully reconsider how the linguistic evidence relates to the early populations. Over the last decades, new lexical and grammatical data has become available. This project provides an open online database containing this lexical material with a critical evaluation of its origins. In order to establish a new timeline for the language history of East Africa, we develop a revised and drastically expanded linguistic reconstruction of Proto Core Cushitic, and of South Omotic. This results in an overview of which language groups were where and in which chronology based on linguistic evidence which serves as input for a interdisciplinary pursuits, especially with archaeologists and geneticists that will provide a new and detailed picture for the peopling of East Africa, linking linguistic groups with archaeological finds and DNA results.Note: This talk has not gone through a process of peer review, and findings should therefore be treated as preliminary and subject to change. Acknowledgement and citation: Mous, Maarten. 2019. Unravelling East Africa's early linguistic history. Talk given at East Africa Day Leiden 27/09/2019