Identifying Datooga loans in Iraqw - and the other way round

The present-day contact of Iraqw and Datooga speaking groups in the Tanzanian Rift valley has a long history which goes back to precolonial times. This contact is reflected in the intertwining of descent groups, in shared cultural practices and in lexical transfers which must have gone both ways, affecting various semantic domains, e.g. subsistence vocabulary (Rottland & Mous 2001). The present talk widens the scope beyond subsistence vocabulary, reporting on recent research into lexical transfers at the Datooga-Iraqw interface along with a discussion of methodological issues concerning the determination of the direction of borrowing, illustrated by various new findings.