7 the Red Sea Marie-Claude SIMEONE-SENELLE and Martine VANHOVE (UMR 8135, CNRS, INALCO, University Paris 7)

à paraître. in Africa as a linguistic area, B. Heine and D. Nurse (eds). Cambridge University Press Concours DR2 – N° 34/01 7 The Red Sea Marie-Claude SIMEONE-SENELLE and Martine VANHOVE (UMR 8135, CNRS, INALCO, University Paris 7) 1 Introduction This chapter deals with the Semitic and Cushitic languages of an area which encompasses both banks of the Red Sea in Africa and in Arabia, i.e. the coastal zone of four countries: Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti and Yemen. The reason for crossing the limits of the African continent is twofold: the historical background, and the present socio-linguistic situation, as we were able to understand it. The geographic proximity of the Red Sea banks was a propitious situation for population movement, even though navigation was quite difficult because of the wind system, the coral reefs, the scarcity of shelters and of water supplies. Still, as early as the second millennium BC, the African and Arabian populations were in permanent contact and the region was already an important commercial route, also followed by migrants. Trading, temporal or permanent trading posts, as well as military conquests favored the intense mixing of populations. A few well-known and significant examples may illustrate these contacts. The archeological remains of Adulis harbor (today Zula in Eritrea, a few kilometers away from Massawa, facing Hodeyda in Yemen) are evidences of the trade with southern Arabia since at least the second millennium BC. Adulis was famous in all the ancient world1 as a very important trading center for goods coming from inland Africa, specially Egypt and Sudan, then from the high plateaus of Tigray, as well as from Arabia, Persia, and India. After the decline of Adulis in the seventh century AD, the expansion of two islands further north, Dahlak and Massawa, took over. Today, if Dahlak has totally collapsed, Massawa harbor is booming again and is a favored place for contact with Yemen. Military conquests and invasions also marked the history of the two regions. The Saba kingdom played an important role in Aksum, then the Abyssinians occupied the western slopes of the Yemeni mountains in the third century AD. In the sixth century AD the area even became an Abyssinian protectorate. In the sixteenth century, the army of the imam Ahmad ibn-Ibrahim al-Ghazi, better known as Gragn, i.e. ‘the left-handed’, the military leader of Adal in Ethiopia, counted numerous Yemeni mercenaries from Zabid (Yemen). More recently, in 1995, the Red Sea banks were again the center of a crisis with the claims of Eritrea and Yemen over the Hanash islands. Consequently, these exchanges and contacts had a deep influence on the culture of the peoples of both banks, so much so that some talk of a Red Sea culture: “Evidently, there was constant intercourse between the two sides of the Red Sea, and indeed a general “Red Sea culture” is postulated” (Munro-Hay 2003:294). It has to be reminded here that the writing system of Afro-Semitic languages such as Amharic and Tigrinya comes from the Ge’ez syllabary which is derived from the South-Arabian alphabet used on the monument engravings of the ancient kingdoms of southern Arabia. Exchanges and contacts between human beings also take place through their languages; this is why a study of the area of the two banks of the Red Sea from the viewpoint of areal linguistics should be tested with reference to whether the Red Sea region can be 1 Cf. Pliny the Elder (1992). understood to be a linguistic area. Such deep historical links from time immemorial until now are bound to have produced some kind of linguistic effects. As a matter of fact, language shift did occur. On the west bank of the Red Sea it is due to the influence and through contact with the ancient South Arabian languages that the Afro- Semitic languages spoken today in Eritrea and Ethiopia developed. They are genetically directly related not to Arabic, but to the southern branch of the Semitic languages to which the South Arabian languages belong. Afro-Semitic developed all along its history in contact with Cushitic languages, but, on the east bank, ancient South Arabian was replaced by Arabic from the seventh century AD onwards. Progressively, the South Arabian speakers were confined in the Yemeni islands of Soqotra and Abd-al-Kuri, off Guardafi Cape, and in a border zone between Yemen and Oman. Today’s modern South Arabian languages (MSA) are, after an important evolution, the offsprings of the ancient languages. As for the current sociolinguistic situation, we first have to point out that all the peoples of the Arabian bank, as well as the great majority of the peoples of the African bank are Muslims, so that religion is one of the reasons of the influence of Arabic on their languages. Concerning education today, the languages taught at school vary according to the different states. In Eritrea, there are three “working” languages, Tigrinya, Arabic and English, and all mother tongues, among them Afar and Saho, are taught at primary level, except for Dahalik speakers, whose language was discovered only in 1996, and for whom Arabic is the medium of instruction. In Djibouti, Arabic is the official language, together which French, which is the teaching medium, while Arabic is part of the curriculum. Afar and Somali, the national languages, are not taught at school. In Sudan, the medium of instruction is Arabic, and Beja, basically an unwritten language, has no official or formal status whatsoever. In Djibouti, Arabic speakers of Yemeni origin are quite numerous in Djibouti city, somewhat less in Obock and Dikhil and contacts are still intense with the areas of Khokha, Taez, Aden and even Hadramawt. In addition, Afar speakers are in contact with Somali speakers in the south, with Arabic in Obock, Tadjoura and Djibouti city, where a lot of migrants from Somali and Ethiopia speak their own language (Amharic, Harari, Oromo, etc.). In Eritrea, the Afar people dwelling along the coast are in contact with the Adeni and Tihami varieties of Yemeni Arabic, those living in the north near Irafayle, in Bori Peninsula are in contact with the Saho. Massawa is a real melting pot where Afar, Arabic, Saho, Tigre, and Tigrinya are in contact. For Dahalik, contacts are mainly with Afar, Arabic, and formerly with Tigre. For Saho speakers, contact languages vary according to the area: along the coast, it is Afar, but in the Tigray region it is Tigre and Tigrinya. In Sudan, most male Beja speakers are bilingual in Beja and Sudanese Arabic, but an important proportion of females is still monolingual. In the south, the contact language is Tigre. It must also be noted that there is an important settlement of Arabic speaking Yemenis in Port Sudan. In Arabia, in both Yemen and Oman, only standard Arabic is taught at school. Male MSA speakers who live in the coastal villages or who are in contact with villages, are usually bilingual in MSA and Arabic, but a lot of females are still monolingual. Some of the children provided with schooling are bilingual. In Soqotra, contact with Arabic concerns mainly males of the north coast and the inlanders trading with the capital city. In spite of this well-known historical situation which goes on today along different lines linked to social dynamics, studies on linguistic contacts between the two banks of the Red Sea are just beginning. David Cohen, speaking from the Arabist viewpoint, was still asking in 1994 (p. 18) whether it was: 2 compréhensible, pour ne prendre qu’un seul exemple, qu’une zone de brassage immémorial comme la mer Rouge, où l’arabe a été confronté avec tant d’autres langues, sémitiques, couchitiques, africaines, et même iraniennes et indonésiennes, reste fermée à des recherches synthétiques sur ces contacts. (D. Cohen 1994:18) From a general point of view, the question which must be considered is whether a territorial continuity and linguistic contact necessarily imply the existence of a linguistic area or Sprachbund in the classical sense of the term, such as defined e.g. by Emeneau (1980:124): “an area which includes languages belonging to more than one family but showing traits in common which are found not to belong to the other members of (at least) one of the families”, or in looser manner by Campbell (1994:1471: “areal linguistics deals with the diffusion of structural features across linguistic boundaries”), who specifies that the languages may be “either unrelated or from different subgroups of a language family”. However it is true that it is even more difficult to deal with this issue when the languages concerned belong to the same phylum, as is the case with the Afroasiatic languages we are dealing with. It may be difficult, or even impossible, to decide between genetic traits, whether they are retentions or parallel innovations, and convergence phenomena. For some linguists following Emeneau’s definition, genetic relation rules out the areal hypothesis, while for others, such as Masica (1976) or Campbell (1994) it is a possibility providing that the branches of the family are distantly related, as e.g. Cushitic and Semitic are. When comparing linguistic traits in a contact situation, another problem is to decide whether contact is unilateral, i.e. whether there is a dominant language from which other languages borrow, or whether it is multilateral, without a dominating language, bringing about convergence phenomena considered as characteristic of linguistic areas. For Tosco (2000), unilateral contact is the rule in the Ethiopian zone such as characterized by Ferguson (1976). But, following Sasse (1986) and Zaborski (1991), Sasse considers that it does not exclude the possibility of smaller linguistic areas in the zone, such as an Eritrean-north Ethiopian area.

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