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

More than 300 million people speak an Afroasiatic language.

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.

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 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 ).

* 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.

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.

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.

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 is the oldest known indigenous language of Egypt and 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.

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.

Omotic as an Afroasiatic family.

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.

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.

The Omotic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic family spoken in southwestern Ethiopia.

A few scholars have raised doubts that the Omotic languages are part of the Afroasiatic language family at all,

Omotic: a new Afroasiatic language family.

The Afroasiatic languages are represented by the Semitic family in southwest Asia, which includes Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, and extinct languages such as Babylonian.

Egyptian Arabic is a variety of the Arabic languages of the Semitic branch of the Afroasiatic language family.

The Northern Berber languages form a dialect continuum across the Maghreb that constitute a branch of the Berber language subgroup of the Afroasiatic family.

The Semitic language family is considered a component of the larger Afroasiatic macro-family of languages.

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 ".

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

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 ).

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.

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 ).

Omotic is generally considered the most divergent branch of the Afroasiatic languages.

The American Nostraticist Allan Bomhard considers Eurasiatic a branch of Nostratic, alongside other branches: Afroasiatic, Elamo-Dravidian, and Kartvelian.

The American Nostraticist Allan Bomhard considers Eurasiatic a branch of Nostratic alongside other branches: Afroasiatic, Elamo-Dravidian, and Kartvelian.

The Chadic, Omotic, and to some extent Cushitic branches of Afroasiatic are tonal — the Omotic languages heavily so — though their sister families of Semitic, Berber, and Egyptian are not.

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

Murray Gell-Mann, Ilia Peiros, and Georgiy Starostin maintain that the Austric hypothesis is less well supported than several other linguistic macrofamilies, including Sino-Caucasian, Eurasiatic, and Afroasiatic since " no detailed proto-Austric glossaries or equally detailed tables of correspondences between the various daughter branches of Austric have been produced.