They are spoken primarily in the Horn of Africa, with minorities speaking Cushitic languages to the north in Egypt and Sudan, and to the south in Kenya and Tanzania.

As of 2012, the Cushitic languages with over one million speakers were Oromo, Somali, Beja, Afar, Hadiyya, Kambaata, and Sidama.

[6] Oromo serves as one of the official working languages of Ethiopia[7] and is also the working language of several of the states within the Ethiopian federal system including Oromia,[8] Harari and Dire Dawa regional states and of the Oromia Zone in the Amhara Region.

[9] Christopher Ehret argues for a unified Proto-Cushitic language in the Red Sea Hills as far back as the Early Holocene.

[17][19] Most Cushitic languages have a system of restrictive tone also known as ‘pitch accent’ in which tonal contours overlaid on the stressed syllable play a prominent role in morphology and syntax.

[22] In marked nominative languages, the noun appears in unmarked "absolutive" case when cited in isolation, or when used as predicative noun and as object of a transitive verb; on the other hand, it is explicitly marked for nominative case when it functions as subject in a transitive or intransitive sentence.

The Omotic languages, once classified as West Cushitic, have almost universally been reclassified as a separate branch of Afroasiatic.

For example, it has been argued that Southern Cushitic belongs in the Eastern branch, with its divergence explained by contact with Hadza- and Sandawe-like languages.

[40] The characteristics of Beja that differ from those of other Cushitic languages are instead generally acknowledged as normal branch variation.

[41] Blemmyan, an early form of Beja – mostly attested through onomastic evidence, but also directly by a small text on an ostracon from Saqqara – was spoken by the Blemmyes, an ancient people of Lower Nubia that appears in the Egyptian historical records from the 6th century BCE onwards.

An early view by Enrico Cerulli proposed a "Sidama" subgroup comprising most of the Omotic languages and the Sidamic group of Highland East Cushitic.

There are also a few languages of uncertain classification, including Yaaku, Dahalo, Aasax, Kw'adza, Boon, Ongota and the Cushitic component of Mbugu (Ma'a).

[46] Bonny Sands (2009) thinks the most convincing proposal is by Savà and Tosco (2003), namely that Ongota is an East Cushitic language with a Nilo-Saharan substratum.

Given the scarcity of data (all omomastic or toponymic), however, it remains unclear if the C-Group culture in fact spoke a Cushitic language.

[51][52] Also, historically, the Southern Nilotic languages have undergone extensive contact with a "missing" branch of East Cushitic that Heine (1979) refers to as Baz.

[58] No reconstruction has been published for Lowland East Cushitic, though Paul D. Black wrote his (unpublished) dissertation on the topic in 1974.