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The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic, sometimes Afrasian ), also known as Hamito-Semitic or Semito-Hamitic, are a language family (or "phylum") of about 400 languages spoken predominantly in West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahara and Sahel. [2] Over 500 million people are native speakers of an Afroasiatic ...
The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They include Arabic, Amharic, Aramaic, Hebrew, and numerous other ancient and modern languages. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, North Africa, [a] the Horn of Africa, [b] [c] Malta, [d] and in large immigrant and expatriate ...
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- Overview
- Origins
- Divisions within the phylum
- External relations
Afro-Asiatic languages, languages of common origin found in the northern part of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and some islands and adjacent areas in Western Asia. About 250 Afro-Asiatic languages are spoken today by a total of approximately 250 million people. Numbers of speakers per language range from about 150 million, as in the case of Arabic, to only a few hundred, as in the case of some Cushitic and Chadic languages.
The name Afro-Asiatic gained wide acceptance following the classification of African languages proposed in 1955–63 by the American linguist Joseph H. Greenberg. Scholars in the former Soviet Union prefer to call these languages “Afrasian.” The name Hamito-Semitic (or Semito-Hamitic), although occasionally still used, is largely considered obsolete; many scholars reject it because it is linguistically wrong—there is no linguistic entity “Hamitic” to be contrasted, as a whole, to “Semitic.” Other designations, such as Erythraean and Lisramic, have gained little acceptance.
The common ancestral dialect cluster from which all modern and extinct Afro-Asiatic languages are assumed to have originated is referred to as Proto-Afro-Asiatic. Proto-Afro-Asiatic is of great antiquity; experts tend to place it in the Mesolithic Period at about 15,000–10,000 bce. There is no general consensus over the location of the Urheimat, the original homeland from which began the migrations into the present locations of the speakers. The doyen of Afrasian studies in the former Soviet Union, Igor Diakonoff, theorized that it arose in what is now the Sahara, from where several subsequent migrations took place after about 5000 bce, including the exit from Africa by speakers of what would become the Semitic languages. Diakonoff accounted for the considerable linguistic diversity of Afro-Asiatic languages by suggesting that there was extensive interethnic and interlanguage contact throughout the region. Largely extralinguistic research based on the “out of Africa” theory for Homo sapiens sapiens has since placed the Urheimat in the Middle East—in the Fertile Crescent, one of the regions in which agriculture developed (c. 10,000 bce). This would mean that speakers of Proto-Afro-Asiatic dialects migrated back into Africa via the Sinai Peninsula and the Nile River valley before they eventually reached the ancient and present locations of the five constituent language families in Africa—i.e., Egyptian (Nile valley), Amazigh (Berber; North Africa and central Sahara), Chadic (Central Africa, Lake Chad basin), Cushitic (Horn of Africa), and Omotic (southwestern Ethiopia). Much later migrations from South Arabia brought some Semitic languages into Eritrea and Ethiopia, again to be followed by the expansion of Arabic in the Islamic period.
Speakers of Afro-Asiatic languages were among the first in human history to develop writing systems. Some Afro-Asiatic languages are known only from documents written as long as 5,000 years ago; examples include Akkadian and Eblaite. Some have disappeared but left traces in the form of inscriptions; Old Libyan, for example, is found in inscriptions dated as early as 139 bce. Others are mentioned in records that were transcribed in European languages, as is the case of the Guanche language of the Canary Islands. Coptic represents a third case; it originated in antiquity and was spoken until the 16th or 17th century ce but is now represented only by liturgical phrases used within the Coptic Orthodox Church.
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Linguists generally recognize six divisions within the Afro-Asiatic phylum: Amazigh (Berber), Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Omotic, and Semitic. These divisions differ in both the number of languages and the degree of genetic relationship as measured in terms of common inherited vocabulary and shared grammatical features, issues considered at further...
Certain similarities to Indo-European languages have prompted scholars to look for a special relationship between Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European. Some scholars even extend this kinship hypothesis to include the Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian, and Dravidian language groups. Attempts have also been made to relate Afro-Asiatic to other African and European linguistic units, such as Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, or Basque. However, the common ancestor of these languages, if there was one, existed so long ago that it is almost impossible to apply sound comparative methods to modern languages in order to test this hypothesis.
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Summary. Afroasiatic languages are the fourth largest linguistic phylum, spoken by some 350 million people in North, West, Central, and East Africa, in the Middle East, and in scattered communities in Europe, the United States, and the Caucasus. Some Afroasiatic languages, such as Arabic, Hausa, Amharic, Somali, and Oromo, are spoken by ...
Afro-Asiatic (or Afroasiatic; also known as “Hamito-Semitic”) is an entity of genetically related languages which is often labeled a macro-family or language phylum due to the number and typological diversity of its member languages and the chronological depth of this entity. In any case the choice of the label is arbitrary and depends on ...
Jun 17, 2020 · There are six branches of the Afro-Asiatic family: Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Omotic and Semitic. Languages in all but the Egyptian branch are still spoken today. The Egyptian Afro-Asiatic languages became extinct (or fell out of everyday use) by the 17th or 18th century. However, Coptic — the modern descendent of Ancient Egyptian ...
Afroasiatic ( Afro-Asiatic ), also known as Afrasian and in older sources as Hamito-Semitic ( Chamito-Semitic) [3] or Semito-Hamitic, [4] is a large language family of about 300 languages. [5] It includes languages spoken predominantly in West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and parts of the Sahel .
