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Afroasiatic languages

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 language, constituting the fourth-largest language family after Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, and Niger–Congo.[3] Most linguists divide the family into six branches: Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Semitic, and Omotic.[4] The vast majority of Afroasiatic languages are considered indigenous to the African continent, including all those not belonging to the Semitic branch.

"Afro-Asiatic" redirects here. For other uses, see Afro-Asiatic (disambiguation).

Afroasiatic

Arabic, if counted as a single language, is by far the most widely spoken within the family, with around 300 million native speakers concentrated primarily in the Middle East and North Africa.[2] Other major Afroasiatic languages include the Chadic Hausa language with over 34 million native speakers, the Semitic Amharic language with 25 million, and the Cushitic Somali language with 15 million. Other Afroasiatic languages with millions of native speakers include the Cushitic Sidaama language, the Semitic Tigrinya language and the Omotic Wolaitta language, though most languages within the family are much smaller in size.[5] There are many well-attested Afroasiatic languages from antiquity that have since died or gone extinct, including Egyptian and the Semitic languages Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew, Phoenician, Amorite, and Ugaritic. There is no consensus among historical linguists as to precisely where or when the common ancestor of all Afroasiatic languages, known as Proto-Afroasiatic, was originally spoken. However, most agree that the Afroasiatic homeland was located somewhere in northeastern Africa, with specific proposals including the Horn of Africa, Egypt, the eastern Sahara. A significant minority of scholars argues for an origin in the Levant. The reconstructed timelines of when Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken vary extensively, with dates ranging from 18,000 BC to 8,000 BC. Even the latest plausible dating makes Afroasiatic the oldest language family accepted by contemporary linguists.[6]


Comparative study of Afroasiatic is hindered by the massive disparities in textual attestation between its branches: while the Semitic and Egyptian branches are attested in writing as early as the fourth millennium BC, Berber, Cushitic, and Omotic languages were often not recorded until the 19th or 20th centuries.[7] While systematic sound laws have not yet been established to explain the relationships between the various branches of Afroasiatic, the languages share a number of common features. One of the most important for establishing membership in the branch is a common set of pronouns.[8] Other widely shared features include a prefix m- which creates nouns from verbs, evidence for alternations between the vowel "a" and a high vowel in the forms of the verb, similar methods of marking gender and plurality, and some details of phonology such as the presence of pharyngeal fricatives. Other features found in multiple branches include a specialized verb conjugation using suffixes (Egyptian, Semitic, Berber), a specialized verb conjugation using prefixes (Semitic, Berber, Cushitic), verbal prefixes deriving middle (t-), causative (s-), and passive (m-) verb forms (Semitic, Berber, Egyptian, Cushitic), and a suffix used to derive adjectives (Egyptian, Semitic).

Name[edit]

In current scholarship, the most common names for the family are Afroasiatic (or Afro-Asiatic), Hamito-Semitic, and Semito-Hamitic.[9][10] Other proposed names that have yet to find widespread acceptance include Erythraic/Erythraean, Lisramic, Noahitic, and Lamekhite.[11][12]


Friedrich Müller introduced the name Hamito-Semitic to describe the family in his Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft (1876).[13] The variant Semito-Hamitic is mostly used in older Russian sources.[9] The elements of the name were derived from the names of two sons of Noah as attested in the Book of Genesis's Table of Nations passage: "Semitic" from the first-born Shem, and "Hamitic" from the second-born Ham (Genesis 5:32).[14] Within the Table of Nations, each of Noah's sons is presented as the common progenitor of various people groups deemed to be closely related: among others Shem was the father of the Jews, Assyrians, and Arameans, while Ham was the father of the Egyptians and Cushites. This genealogy does not reflect the actual origins of these peoples' languages: for example, the Canaanites are descendants of Ham according to the Table, even though Hebrew is now classified as a Canaanite language, while the Elamites are ascribed to Shem despite their language being totally unrelated to Hebrew.[15] The term Semitic for the Semitic languages had already been coined in 1781 by August Ludwig von Schlözer, following an earlier suggestion by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz in 1710.[16] Hamitic was first used by Ernest Renan in 1855 to refer to languages that appeared similar to the Semitic languages, but were not themselves provably a part of the family.[16] The belief in a connection between Africans and the Biblical Ham, which had existed at least as far back as Isidore of Seville in the 6th century AD, led scholars in the early 19th century to speak vaguely of "Hamian" or "Hamitish" languages.[17]


The term Hamito-Semitic has largely fallen out of favor among linguists writing in English, but is still frequently used in the scholarship of various other languages, such as German.[18][19] Several issues with the label Hamito-Semitic have led many scholars to abandon the term and criticize its continued use. One common objection is that the Hamitic component inaccurately suggests that a monophyletic "Hamitic" branch exists alongside Semitic. In addition, Joseph Greenberg has argued that Hamitic possesses racial connotations, and that "Hamito-Semitic" overstates the centrality of the Semitic languages within the family.[20][21][22] By contrast, Victor Porkhomovsky suggests that the label is simply an inherited convention, and doesn't imply a duality of Semitic and "Hamitic" any more than Indo-European implies a duality of Indic and "European".[12] Because of its use by several important scholars and in the titles of significant works of scholarship, the total replacement of Hamito-Semitic is difficult.[22]


While Greenberg ultimately popularized the name "Afroasiatic" in 1960, it appears to have been coined originally by Maurice Delafosse, as French afroasiatique, in 1914.[20] The name refers to the fact that it is the only major language family with large populations in both Africa and Asia.[12] Due to concerns that "Afroasiatic" could imply the inclusion of all languages spoken across Africa and Asia, the name "Afrasian" (Russian: afrazijskije) was proposed by Igor Diakonoff in 1980. At present it predominantly sees use among Russian scholars.[21][12]


The names Lisramic—based on the Afroasiastic root *lis- ("tongue") and the Egyptian word rmṯ ("person")—and Erythraean—referring to the core area around which the languages are spoken, the Red Sea—have also been proposed.[9]

Linguist H. Fleming proposed that the near-extinct is a separate branch of Afroasiatic;[54] however, this is only one of several competing theories.[4][49] About half of current scholarly hypotheses on Ongota's origins align it with Afroasiatic in some way.[55]

Ongota language

proposed that Beja is not part of Cushitic, but a separate branch.[56] The prevailing opinion, however, is that Beja is a branch of Cushitic.[57]

Robert Hetzron

The extinct has been proposed to represent a branch of Afroasiatic.[58] Although an Afroasiatic connection is sometimes viewed as refuted, it continues to be defended by scholars such as Edward Lipiński.[59]

Meroitic language

The is usually considered part of the Chadic languages;[60] however, Roger Blench has proposed that it may be a separate branch of Afroasiatic.[61][62]

Kujarge language

Vocabulary comparison[edit]

Pronouns[edit]

The forms of the pronouns are very stable throughout Afroasiatic (excluding Omotic),[147] and they have been used as one of the chief tools for determining whether a language belongs to the family.[8] However, there is no consensus on what the reconstructed set of Afroasiatic pronouns might have looked like.[34] A common characteristic of AA languages is the existence of a special set of "independent" pronouns, which are distinct from subject pronouns. They can occur together with subject pronouns but cannot fulfill an object function.[202] Also common are dependent/affix pronouns (used for direct objects and to mark possession).[34] For most branches, the first person pronouns contain a nasal consonant (n, m), whereas the third person displays a sibilant consonant (s, sh).[203] Other commonalities are masculine and feminine forms used in both the second and third persons, except in Cushitic and Omotic.[147] These pronouns tend to show a masculine "u" and a feminine "i".[116] The Omotic forms of the personal pronouns differ from the others, with only the plural forms in North Omotic appearing potentially to be cognate.[204]

at the Linguist List MultiTree Project: Genealogical trees attributed to Delafosse 1914, Greenberg 1950–1955, Greenberg 1963, Fleming 1976, Hodge 1976, Orel & Stolbova 1995, Diakonoff 1996–1998, Ehret 1995–2000, Hayward 2000, Militarev 2005, Blench 2006, and Fleming 2006

Afro-Asiatic

presented by Alexander Militarev at his talk "Genealogical classification of Afro-Asiatic languages according to the latest data" at the conference on the 70th anniversary of V.M. Illich-Svitych, Moscow, 2004; short annotations of the talks given there (in Russian)

Afro-Asiatic and Semitic genealogical trees

by Alexander Militarev in "Proceedings of the Barcelona Symposium on comparative Semitic", 19-20/11/2004. Aula Orientalis 23/1-2, 2005, pp. 83–129.

Root Extension And Root Formation In Semitic And Afrasian

by Alexander Militarev in "Papers on Semitic and Afroasiatic Linguistics in Honor of Gene B. Gragg." Ed. by Cynthia L. Miller. Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization 60. Chicago: The Oriental Institute, 2007, p. 139–145.

Akkadian-Egyptian lexical matches

A comparison of Orel-Stolbova's and Ehret's Afro-Asiatic reconstructions

by Rolf Theil (2006)

"Is Omotic Afro-Asiatic?"

of Roger Blench (with family tree).

Afro-Asiatic webpage