Afroasiatic languages

Afroasiatic (Afro-Asiatic), also known as Afrasian and traditionally as Hamito-Semitic (Chamito-Semitic), is a large language family of several hundred related languages and dialects. It comprises about 300 or so living languages and dialects, according to the 2009 Ethnologue estimate. It includes languages spoken predominantly in the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahel.

Afroasiatic languages have 350+ million native speakers, the fourth largest number of any language family. It has six branches: Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Omotic and Semitic. The most widely spoken Afroasiatic language is Arabic (including literary Arabic and the spoken colloquial varieties), which has around 200 to 230 million native speakers concentrated primarily in the Middle East and in parts of North Africa.Tamazight and other Berber varieties are spoken in Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, northern Mali, and northern Niger by about 25 to 35 million people. Other widely spoken Afroasiatic languages include:

Christopher Ehret

Christopher Ehret (born July 27, 1941), who currently holds the position of Distinguished Research Professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, is an American scholar of African history and African historical linguistics particularly known for his efforts to correlate linguistic taxonomy and reconstruction with the archeological record. He has published ten books, most recently History and the Testimony of Language (2011) and A Dictionary of Sandawe (2012), the latter co-edited with his wife, Patricia Ehret. He has written around seventy scholarly articles on a wide range of historical, linguistic, and anthropological subjects. These works include monographic articles on Bantu subclassification; on internal reconstruction in Semitic; on the reconstruction of proto-Cushitic and proto-Eastern Cushitic; and, with Mohamed Nuuh Ali, on the classification of the Soomaali languages. He has also contributed to a number of encyclopedias on African topics and on world history.