Cushitic Lexical Database (CLD)

The Cushitic Lexical Database (CLD) is a comparative lexical dataset covering 23 East Cushitic languages across all major subgroups (Northern, Highland, Omo-Tana, Central, Southern, and Dahalo). It comprises over 8,500lexical entries compiled from published dictionaries and grammars, unpublished word lists, recent dissertations, and original fieldwork by the author. Entries are keyed to concept IDs that link them to the comparative evidence and cognate sets in the accompanying PhD dissertation (Sosal 2026), and forms reconstructed for Proto-Highland East Cushitic (PHEC) and Proto-Northern Highland East Cushitic (PNHEC) carry reconstruction-evaluation scores. Loanword direction is annotated, and reconstruction scores are assigned only to forms identified as inherited rather than borrowed. The workbook contains three sheets: Data, ReadMe (license & citation, symbols, abbreviations, language codes, and per-language statistics), and Sources. An interactive version is available at ahmedsosal.github.io