2000 BCE: (Omotic Languages Formerly Present in Northern Ethiopia — Omotic Languages Today Spoken Across Southern Ethiopia but the Occurrence of Omotic Loanw…

2000 BCE: (Omotic Languages Formerly Present in Northern Ethiopia — Omotic Languages Today Spoken Across Southern Ethiopia but the Occurrence of Omotic Loanwords in the Agaw Languages of Northern Ethiopia Revealing the Presence Prior to 2000 BCE of Omotic Languages in Northern Ethiopia as Well, Indicating a Much Wider Former Distribution of Omotic-Speaking Peoples Across the Ethiopian Highlands Before Being Pushed Southward by Cushitic-Speaking Expansions): Omotic languages today are spoken across southern Ethiopia, but the occurrence of Omotic loanwords in the Agaw languages of northern Ethiopia reveals the presence, prior to 2000 BCE, of Omotic languages in those regions also. The loanword evidence indicates that Omotic-speaking peoples once occupied a much wider territory across the Ethiopian Highlands than their present-day distribution suggests. Before 2000 BCE, Omotic languages were spoken as far north as the Agaw-speaking regions of northern Ethiopia. Their subsequent retreat southward was driven by the expansion of Cushitic-speaking peoples, but the linguistic traces of their former presence survive as loanwords embedded in the Agaw vocabulary — fossilized evidence of a linguistic geography that existed four thousand years ago.