Contact or cognate languages? The Ogiek of Mariashoni and the Akie of Tanzania in the Kalenjin continuum

When speaking about language contact, it is always important to remember that contact happens between speakers and hearers – not between lan- guages. Languages do not meet nor interact – human beings do. Language in- teraction is ultimately just one of the many results of human interaction. This is far from trivial: as an intrinsic part of human interaction, the linguistic effects of contact are most likely to reflect the diversity of (verbal and non-verbal) contact situations. The population of East Africa and the advent of herding and farming are one of those contact situations, and the hunting and gathering communities are one of its most peculiar linguistic effects. The Ogiek of Marashoni is a Southern Nilotic, Kalenjin language, spoken by a community of hunters and gatherers of the Eastern Escarpment of the Mau for- est in Kenya. Recent studies on the grammar and vocabulary of the language (I. Micheli, Grammatical Sketch and short vocabulary of the Ogiek Language of Mariashoni, Trieste, eut, 2019) have shown that it can be seen as part of a continuum stretching originally from Kenya to Tanzania, where currently another group of HGs speaks a very closely related Kalenjin language: Akie. In the second half of 1500, the first Maasai pastoralist tribes settled in the region where Ogiek and Akie originally lived probably as a unique community. The advent of the Maasai, most likely caused the scattering of Ogiek and Akie towards the areas of the Mau forest in the present- day Kenya and of Western Arusha in Tanzania. From that moment on, the Ogiek and Akie HGs groups, lived as parasite societies of their Maasai invaders, by whom they were considered dorobo, i.e. “servants”. Given this peculiar situation, aims of this paper are: 1) presenting the main phonological and morphological features which demonstrate a true cognateness among the Kalenjin languages of the whole continuum, focusing mainly on the three by now best described languages: Nandi, Akie and Ogiek; 2) discussing the effects of the prolonged contact between Maa and Ogiek / Akie, in terms of linguistic change, erosion and evolution.