Afroasiatic , also known as Afrasian and traditionally Hamito-Semitic , is a large language family, including 300 or so living languages. Afroasiatic languages are spoken predominantly in the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahel. More than 300 million people speak an Afroasiatic language. The most widely spoken Afroasiatic language is Arabic (including literary Arabic and the spoken colloquial varieties), with about 200 to 230 million native speakers, spoken mostly in the Middle East and parts of North Africa. Berber (including all its varieties) is spoken in Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, northern Mali, and northern Niger by about 25 to 35 million people. Other widely spoken Afroasiatic languages are Hausa, the dominant language of northern Nigeria and southern Niger, spoken as a first language by 25 million people and used as a lingua franca by another 20 million across West Africa and the Sahel; Oromo of Ethiopia and Kenya, with about 33 million speakers; Amharic of Ethiopia, with over 25 million native speakers, not including the millions of other Ethiopians speaking it as a secondary language; Somali, spoken by 15.5 million people in Greater Somalia; and Modern Hebrew, spoken by about seven million people worldwide. In addition to languages spoken today, Afroasiatic includes several important ancient languages, such as Ancient Egyptian, Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew, and Aramaic. Etymology The Afroasiatic language family was originally referred to as "Hamito-Semitic", a term introduced in the 1860s by the German scholar Karl Richard Lepsius. The name was later popularized by Friedrich Müller in his Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft (Wien 1876-88). The term "Afroasiatic" (often now spelled as "Afro-Asiatic") was later coined by Maurice Delafosse (1914). However, it did not come into general use until Joseph Greenberg (1963) formally proposed its adoption. In doing so, Greenberg sought to emphasize the fact that Afroasiatic was the only language family that was represented transcontinentally, in both Africa and Asia. 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 phylum's constituent languages. The term "Hamito-Semitic" remains in use in the academic traditions of some European countries. Distribution and branches The Afroasiatic language family is usually considered to include the following branches: Berber Chadic Cushitic Egyptian Omotic Semitic While there is general agreement on these six families, there are some points of disagreement among linguists who study Afroasiatic. In particular: The Omotic language branch is the most controversial member of Afroasiatic, since the grammatical formatives which most linguists have given 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, while others have raised doubts about it being part of 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) believes the most convincing proposal is by Savà and Tosco (2003), 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 but then shifted to speaking a Cushitic language while retaining some characteristics of their earlier Nilo-Saharan language. Beja is sometimes listed as a separate branch of Afroasiatic but is more often included in the Cushitic branch, which has a high degree of internal diversity. Whether the various branches of Cushitic actually form a language family is sometimes questioned, but not their inclusion in Afroasiatic itself. 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: there are also many disagreements concerning the internal classification of the Indo-European languages, for instance. Meroitic has been proposed as an unclassified Afroasiatic language, as it shares the phonotactics characteristic of the family, but there is not enough evidence to secure a classification. Attribution: Article text available under CC-BY-SA sourced from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afroasiatic_languagesCreative Commons image sourced from http://wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hamito-Semitic_languages.jpg

• published: 18 Sep 2013
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