Afroasiatic language family

The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic), also known as Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic, and sometimes also as Afrasian, Erythraean or Lisramic, are a language family of about 300 languages that are spoken predominantly in the geographic subregions of Western Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahara/ Sahel. With the exception of its Semitic branch, all branches of the Afroasiatic family are exclusively native to the African continent.

Afroasiatic languages have over 500 million native speakers, which is the fourth-largest number of native speakers of any language family (after Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, and Niger–Congo). The phylum has six branches: Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Semitic, and Omotic. The most widely spoken modern Afroasiatic language or dialect continuum by far is Arabic, a ''de facto'' group of distinct language varieties within the Semitic branch. The languages that evolved from Proto-Arabic have around 313 million native speakers, concentrated primarily in the Middle East and North Africa.

In addition to the languages spoken today, Afroasiatic includes many ancient languages, such as Egyptian, which forms a distinct branch of the family; and within the Semitic family, Akkadian, Hebrew, Phoenician, other Canaanite languages, Amorite, Ugaritic and Aramaic. While there is no consensus among historical linguists concerning the original homeland of the Afroasiatic family or the period when the parent language (i.e. Proto-Afroasiatic) was spoken, most agree that it was located within a region of Northeast Africa. Proposed specific locations include the Horn of Africa, Egypt, the eastern Sahara, and the Levant.

Etymology

In the early 19th century, linguists grouped the Berber, Cushitic and Egyptian languages within a "Hamitic" phylum, in acknowledgement of these languages' genetic relation with each other and with those in the Semitic phylum. The terms "Hamitic" and "Semitic" were etymologically derived from the Book of Genesis, which describes various Biblical tribes descended from Ham and Shem, two sons of Noah. By the 1860s, the main constituent elements within the broader Afroasiatic family had been worked out.

Friedrich Müller introduced the name "Hamito-Semitic" for the entire language family in his ''Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft'' (1876). Maurice Delafosse (1914) later coined the term "Afroasiatic" (often now spelled "Afro-Asiatic"). However, it did not come into general use until Joseph Greenberg (1950) formally proposed its adoption. In doing so, Greenberg sought to emphasize the fact that 'Hamitic' was not a valid group and that language cladistics did not reflect race. In current scholarly usage, the most commonly used names are "Afroasiatic", "Hamito-Semitic", and "Semito-Hamitic".

Individual scholars have also called the family "Erythraean" (Tucker 1966) and "Lisramic" (Hodge 1972). In lieu of "Hamito-Semitic", the Russian linguist Igor Diakonoff later suggested the term "Afrasian", meaning "half African, half Asiatic", in reference to the geographic distribution of the family's constituent languages.

Distribution and branches

Scholars generally treat the Afroasiatic language family as including at least the following five branches:
* Berber
* Chadic
* Cushitic
* Egyptian
* Semitic

A sixth family's inclusion in Afroasiatic is disputed by a minority of scholars:
* Omotic

Although there is general agreement on these six families, linguists who study Afroasiatic raise some points of disagreement, in particular:
* The Omotic language branch is the most controversial member of Afroasiatic because the grammatical formatives to which most linguists have given the greatest weight in classifying languages in the family "are either absent or distinctly wobbly" (Hayward 1995). Greenberg (1963) and others considered it a subgroup of Cushitic, whereas others have raised doubts about its being part of proper Afroasiatic at all (e.g. Theil 2006).
* The Afroasiatic identity of Ongota is also broadly questioned, as is its position within Afroasiatic among those who accept it, due to the "mixed" appearance of the language and a paucity of research and data. Harold Fleming (2006) proposes that Ongota constitutes a separate branch of Afroasiatic. Bonny Sands (2009) finds the proposal by Savà and Tosco (2003) the most convincing: namely that Ongota is an East Cushitic language with a Nilo-Saharan substratum. In other words, it would appear that the Ongota people once spoke a Nilo-Saharan language, then shifted to speaking a Cushitic language but retained some characteristics of their earlier Nilo-Saharan language.
* Beja, sometimes listed as a separate branch of Afroasiatic, is more often included in the Cushitic branch, which has a substantial degree of internal diversity.
* There is no consensus on the interrelationships of the five non-Omotic branches of Afroasiatic (see § Subgrouping below). This situation is not unusual, even among long-established language families: scholars also frequently disagree on the internal classification of the Indo-European languages, for instance.
* The extinct Meroitic language has been proposed (Bruce Trigger, 1964,Trigger, Bruce G., ''‘Meroitic and Eastern Sudanic: A Linguistic Relationship?’'', Kush 12, 1964, 188–194. 1977Trigger, Bruce, G.,''‘The Classification of Meroitic: Geographical Considerations’'', Schriften zur Geschichte und Kultur des Alten Orients 13, 1977, 421–435.) as an unclassified Afroasiatic language, because it shares the phonotactics characteristic of the family, but there is not enough evidence to secure a classification (Fritz Hintze, 1974,Hintze, Fritz, ''‘Some Problems of Meroitic Philology’'', Abdel Gadir Mahmoud Abdalla (ed.), Studies of the Ancient Languages of the Sudan, Sudanese Studies 3, Khartoum University Press, Khartoum, 1974, 73–78.)
* The classification of Kujargé within Afroasiatic is not agreed upon. Blench (2008) notes that much of the basic vocabulary looks Cushitic, and speculates that Kujargé could even be a conservative language transitional between Chadic and Cushitic.

Demographics

In descending order of the number of speakers, widely-spoken Afroasiatic languages include:

* Arabic ( Semitic), the most widely spoken Afroasiatic language today, has over 300 million native speakers; additionally, Classical Arabic, an archaic form of the language, is the liturgical language of Islam, the world's second-largest religion.
* Hausa ( Chadic), the dominant language of northern Nigeria and southern Niger

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