Harold Fleming ( 2006 ) proposes that Ongota constitutes a separate branch of Afroasiatic.

Ongota has features of both Afroasiatic and Nilo-Saharan languages that confuse its classification.

Afroasiatic ( alternatively Afro-Asiatic ), also known as Hamito-Semitic, is a large language family, including about 375 living languages.

The most widely spoken Afroasiatic language is Arabic ( including all its colloquial varieties ), with 230 million native speakers, spoken mostly in the Middle East and North Africa.

The Afroasiatic language family is usually considered to include the following branches:

While there is general agreement on these six families, there are some points of disagreement among linguists who study Afroasiatic.

* 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 ).

With written attestations appearing since the Bronze Age, in the form of the Anatolian languages and Mycenaean Greek, the Indo-European family is significant to the field of historical linguistics as possessing the longest recorded history after the Afroasiatic family.

In the course of his work, Greenberg coined the term " Afroasiatic " to replace the earlier term " Hamito-Semitic ," after showing that Hamitic, widely accepted since the 19th century, is not a valid language family.

The difficulty in making any statement on particulars of Proto-Human lies in the time depth involved, which is far beyond what linguists can trace back today ( between five and ten millennia in the cases of Indo-European and Afroasiatic ).

Egyptian is the oldest known indigenous language of Egypt and a branch of the Afroasiatic language family.

Although Egyptian is the oldest Afroasiatic language documented in written form, its morphological repertoire is greatly different from that of the rest of the Afroasiatic in general and Semitic in particular.

This suggests that Egyptian had already undergone radical changes from Proto-Afroasiatic before being recorded, that the Afroasiatic phylum has as of yet been studied with an excessively Semito-centric approach, or that Afroasiatic is a typological rather than genetic grouping of languages.

( The general consensus is that Afroasiatic is indeed a genetic grouping, and that Egyptian did in fact diverge greatly in its prerecorded history, although there is almost certainly a Semitic bias in Afroasiatic reconstruction.

It was slightly broader than Greenberg's grouping but it also left out Afroasiatic.

Usually also included are the Afroasiatic languages native to the North Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Near East, as well as the Dravidian languages of the Indian Subcontinent ( sometimes extended to Elamo-Dravidian, connecting India and the Persian Plateau ).

Akkadian ( lišānum akkadītum, ak. kADû ) ( also Accadian, Assyro-Babylonian ) is an extinct Semitic language ( part of the greater Afroasiatic language family ) that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia.

" According to him, the root can also be found in Nilo-Saharan, Niger – Kordofanian, Afroasiatic, Eurasiatic, Dené – Caucasian, Austric, and Amerind.

According to him, similar forms can also be found outside Indo-Pacific in Australian, Nilo-Saharan, Niger – Kordofanian, Afroasiatic, Eurasiatic, Dravidian, Austric, and Amerind, although its meaning has changed significantly in some of these families.

This demonstration also led to the rejection ( by him and by linguistics as a whole ) of the term Hamitic as having no coherent meaning in historical linguistics ; as a result, he renamed the newly reclassified family " Afroasiatic ".

Sergei Starostin's school has now included Afroasiatic in a broadly defined Nostratic.

Sergei Starostin's school has now re-included Afroasiatic in a broadly defined Nostratic, while reserving the term Eurasiatic to designate the narrower subgrouping which comprises the rest of the macrofamily.

Greenberg basically agreed with the Nostratic concept, though he stressed a deep internal division between its northern ' tier ' ( his Eurasiatic ) and a southern ' tier ' ( principally Afroasiatic and Dravidian ).

Greenberg basically agreed with the Nostratic concept, though he stressed a deep internal division between its northern ' tier ' ( his Eurasiatic ) and a southern ' tier ' ( principally Afroasiatic and Dravidian ).

Of the other Afroasiatic branches, Egyptian shows its greatest affinities with Semitic, Berber, and to a lesser extent Cushitic.

Given its widespread occurrence in the Sahara, the Capsian culture is identified by some historical linguists as a possible ancestor of the speakers of modern Afroasiatic languages of North Africa which includes the Berber languages in North Africa.

While focused on Semitic languages as the only branch of the broader Afroasiatic languages that has its distribution outside Africa, a recent study by Kitchen et al proposed through the use of Bayesian computational phylogenetic techniques that " contemporary Ethiosemitic languages of Africa reflect a single introduction of early Ethiosemitic from southern Arabia approximately 2800 years ago ", and that this single introduction of Ethiosemitic underwent " Rapid Diversification " within Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Following Pedersen, Illich-Svitych, and Dolgopolsky, most advocates of the theory have included Afroasiatic, though criticisms by Joseph Greenberg and others from the late 1980s onward suggested a reassessment of this position.

Fleming ( 1969 ) argued that it should instead be classified as an independent branch of Afroasiatic, a view which Bender ( 1971 ) established to most linguists ' satisfaction, though a few linguists maintain the West Cushitic position,

Some linguists ' proposals for grouping within Afroasiatic

* Newman, Paul ( 1980 ) The Classification of Chadic within Afroasiatic.

The classification of Chadic within Afroasiatic.

Most recently, Nostraticists have accepted Eurasiatic as a subgroup within Nostratic ( 2005: 331 ) with Afroasiatic, Kartvelian, and Dravidian forming the rest of Nostratic.

Allan Bomhard ( 2008 ), who relies more heavily on Afroasiatic and Dravidian than on Uralic, as do members of the " Moscow School ", reconstructs a different vowel system, with three pairs of vowels represented as:, as well as independent / i /, / o /, and / u /.

However, this view has largely been abandoned, with Omotic generally agreed to be an independent branch of Afroasiatic, primarily due to the work of Harold C. Fleming ( 1974 ) and M. Lionel Bender ( 1975 ).

More than 300 million people speak an Afroasiatic language.

Other widely spoken Afroasiatic languages are Amharic, the national language of Ethiopia, with 18 million native speakers ; Somali, spoken by around 19 million people in Greater Somalia ; and Hausa, the dominant language of northern Nigeria and southern Niger, spoken by 18. 5 million people and used as a lingua franca in large parts of the Sahel, with some 25 million speakers in total.

The Afroasiatic language family was originally referred to as " Hamito-Semitic ", a term introduced in the 1860s by the German scholar Karl Richard Lepsius.

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.

The term Afroasiatic Urheimat ( Urheimat meaning " original homeland " in German ) refers to the ' hypothetical ' place where Proto-Afroasiatic speakers lived in a single linguistic community, or complex of communities, before this original language dispersed geographically and divided into distinct languages.

This would make it a language family about as old as Indo-European ( 4000 to 7, 000 BC according to several hypotheses cited in Mallory 1997: 106 ) but considerably younger than Afroasiatic ( c. 10, 000 BC according to Diakonoff 1988: 33n, 11, 000 to 16, 000 BC according to Ehret 2002: 35 – 36 ).

The Chadic languages constitute a language family of perhaps 150 languages spoken across northern Nigeria, southern Niger, southern Chad, Central African Republic and nortern Cameroon, belonging to the Afroasiatic phylum.

The Cushitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family spoken in the Horn of Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Sudan and Egypt.

Omotic: a new Afroasiatic language family.

It differs by including Nivkh, Japonic, Korean, and Ainu ( which the Nostraticists had excluded from comparison because they are single languages rather than language families ) and in excluding Afroasiatic.

The extinct Meroitic language of ancient Kush has been accepted by linguists such as Rille, Dimmendaal, and Blench as Nilo-Saharan, though others argue for an Afroasiatic affiliation.

They constitute a branch of the Afroasiatic language family.

Egyptian belongs to the Afroasiatic language family, formerly known as Hamito-Semitic.

Afroasiatic */ l / merged with Egyptian < n >, < r >, < ꜣ >, and < j > in the dialect on which the written language was based, while being preserved in other Egyptian varieties.