Cushitic-speaking peoples are the ethnolinguistic groups who speak Cushitic languages natively.

[3] The nomadic Medjay and the Blemmyes—the latter a section of the historical descendant of the former—are believed by many historians to be ancestors of modern-day speakers of Beja; there appears to be linguistic continuity, suggesting that a language ancestral to Beja was spoken in the Nile Valley by the time of the Twelfth Dynasty of Egypt.

[4] From an analysis of the lexicon of the Nubian languages, Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst proposes that when Nubian speakers first reached the Nile Valley ca 1500 BC, they encountered Cushitic-speaking peoples from whom they borrowed a large number of words, mainly connected with livestock production.

This rewrites the temporal-geographical territorial existence of Eastern Cushites during the 2nd millennium BCE, placing them closer to the Nile Valley than often hypothesized through strict formalist linguistic associative projections that fixed them conservatively within the bounds of the Horn of Africa.

[5] Roger Blench proposes that an extinct and otherwise unattested branch of Cushitic may be responsible for some of the pastoral cultural features of Khoekhoe people ca 2000 years BP.