Af Somali is also Cushitic. You're confusing me kkkk. Some say Maay is a dialect, some say it's a different language. I see it as Spanish and Portuguese. But it's still Somali.
http://aboutworldlanguages.com/Somali
The dialects of af Somali are
- "Northern Somali, also known as Common or Standard Somali, is the most widely used dialect that serves as a basis for Standard Somali
- Benaadir (coastal Somali) is spoken on the Benadir coast and also in the capital of Mogadishu. Speakers of Benaadir readily understand Standard Somali.
- Af-Ashraaf is a distinct variety which has limited intelligibility to speakers of Standard Somali."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maay_Maay
Af Maay is not mutually intelligible and is therefore a separate language.
"Maay is principally spoken by the Digil and Mirifle (
Rahanweyn or Sab) clans in the southern regions of
Somalia.
[3] Its speech area extends from the southwestern border with
Ethiopia to a region close to the coastal strip between
Mogadishu and
Kismayo, including the city of
Baidoa.
[4] Maay is not
mutually comprehensible with Northern Somali or
Benadir, and it differs considerably in sentence structure and phonology.
[5] It is also not generally used in education or media. However, Maay speakers often use Standard Somali as a
lingua franca,
[4] which is learned via mass communications, internal migration and urbanisation.
[5]
Maay is closely related with the
Jiido,
Dabarre,
Garre and
Tunni languages that are also spoken by smaller Rahanweyn communities. Collectively, these languages present similarities with
Oromo that are not found in mainstream Somali. Chief among these is the lack of
pharyngeal sounds in the Rahanweyn/Digil and Mirifle languages, features which by contrast typify Somali. The
retroflex /ɖ/ is also replaced by /r/ in some positions. Although in the past frequently classified as dialects of Somali, more recent research by the linguist
Mohamed Diriye Abdullahi has shown that these varieties, including Maay, constitute separate Cushitic languages. They may thus represent traces of an Oromo
substratum in the southern Rahanweyn confederacy.
[6]"