Charles Ferguson

Charles A. Ferguson

Charles Albert Ferguson was a U.S. linguist who taught at Stanford University. He was one the founders of sociolinguistics and is best known for his work on diglossia. The TOEFL test was created under his leadership at the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington, DC...

 first proposed the Ethiopian Language Area (1970, 1976). (Various scholars may also use the terms Sprachbund

Sprachbund

A Sprachbund – also known as a linguistic area, convergence area, diffusion area or language crossroads – is a group of languages that have become similar in some way because of geographical proximity and language contact. They may be genetically unrelated, or only distantly related...

 or "Linguistic Area".) He posited a number of phonological and morpho-syntactic features that were found widely across Ethiopia

Ethiopia

Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...

 (which included Eritrea

Eritrea

Eritrea , officially the State of Eritrea, is a country in the Horn of Africa. Eritrea derives it's name from the Greek word Erethria, meaning 'red land'. The capital is Asmara. It is bordered by Sudan in the west, Ethiopia in the south, and Djibouti in the southeast...

 at that time), including the Ethio-Semitic

Ethiopian Semitic languages

Ethiopian Semitic is a language group, which together with Old South Arabian forms the Western branch of the South Semitic languages. The languages are spoken in both Ethiopia and Eritrea...

, Cushitic

Cushitic languages

The Cushitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family spoken in the Horn of Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Sudan and Egypt. They are named after the Biblical character Cush, who was identified as an ancestor of the speakers of these specific languages as early as AD 947...

, and Omotic languages

Omotic languages

The Omotic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic family spoken in southwestern Ethiopia. The Ge'ez alphabet is used to write some Omotic languages, the Roman alphabet for some others. They are fairly agglutinative, and have complex tonal systems .-Language list:The North and South Omotic...

, (though it did not include the Nilo-Saharan languages). Since then, others have pointed out smaller areas of shared features within this larger area, (Appleyard 1989, Breeze 1988, Sasse 1986, Tosco 1994, Wedekind 1989). One of the strongest features of the Ethiopian Language Area seems to be the use of the verb "say" as an inflected dummy element for an uninflected lexical base (Appleyard 2001, Cohen et al. 2002).

Tosco has challenged Ferguson’s work, pointing out flaws (2000). He concludes that the Ethiopian Language Area is not valid, and suggests that Ferguson’s work reflects the politics of his time, when there was a strong emphasis on Ethiopian unity.

This topic is still not settled among Ethiopian linguists.

External links

• http://cgi.server.uni-frankfurt.de/fb09/ifas/JLCCMS/issues/THEMA_2/06_M_Tosco.pdf