ABSTRACT
Outer South Ethiopic (OSE) languages are spoken in the area west and south of Addis Ababa. Gafat has recently become extinct and was spoken in the Goddjam Governorate General, in Western Ethiopia. The rest, the Gunnan-Gurage tongues, are spoken in the so-called Gurage region, a Semitic enclave surrounded by Rift Valley (Highland East) Cushitic languages, about 100 km south of Addis Ababa, along with East Gurage (see "Silte," Chapter 22 in this volume) which belongs to the other major branch of South Ethiopic. Even though the area of GG is separate from the one recently vacated by Gafat by hundreds of kilometers, it is reasonable to posit that once there was a continuous OSE territory enclosing the ones mentioned and what is between them. Whether the map of Africa by the Dutch geographer Abraham Ortelius (1527-1598), which shows Gafat and Gurage to be contiguous, is to be taken as a proof remains to be seen.
