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The Afro-Asiatic languages constitute a language family with about 375 languages (SIL estimate) and more than 300 million speakers spread throughout North Africa, East Africa, the Sahel, and Southwest Asia (including some 200 million speakers of Arabic). Other names sometimes given to this family include "Afrasian", "Hamito-Semitic" (deprecated), "Lisramic" (Hodge 1972), "Erythraean" (Tucker 1966). The family includes the following language subfamilies: Many people regard the Ongota language as Omotic, but its classification within the family remains controversial, partly for lack of data. Harold Fleming tentatively suggests treating it as an independent branch of non-Omotic Afro-Asiatic.* No agreement exists on where Proto-Afro-Asiatic speakers lived, though the language is generally believed to have originated in Northeast Africa**. Some scholars (such as Igor Diakonoff and Lionel Bender, for example) have proposed Ethiopia, because it includes the majority of the diversity of the Afro-Asiatic language family and has very diverse groups in close geographic proximity, often considered a tell-tale sign for a linguistic geographic origin. Other researchers (such as Christopher Ehret, for example) have put forward the western Red Sea coast and the Sahara. A minority, such as Alexander Militarev suggest a linguistic homeland in the Levant (specifically, he identifies Afro-Asiatic with the Natufian culture), with Semitic being the only branch to stay put.* The Semitic languages form the only Afro-Asiatic subfamily extant outside of Africa. Some scholars believe that, in historical or near-historical times, Semitic speakers crossed from South Arabia back into Ethiopia and Eritrea, while others, such as A. Murtonen, dispute this view, suggesting that the Semitic branch may have originated in Ethiopia. Tonal languages appear in the Omotic, Chadic, and South and East Cushitic branches of Afro-Asiatic, according to Ehret (1996). The Semitic, Berber, and Egyptian branches do not use tones phonemically.
Common features and cognates Common features of the Afro-Asiatic languages include: Some cognates include: In the verbal system, Semitic, Berber, and Cushitic (including Beja) all provide evidence for a prefix conjugation: All Afro-Asiatic subfamilies show evidence of a causative affix s, but a similar suffix also appears in other groups, such as the Niger-Congo languages. Semitic, Berber, Cushitic (including Beja), and Chadic support possessive pronoun suffixes. Classification history Medieval scholars sometimes linked two or more branches of Afro-Asiatic together; as early as the 9th century the Hebrew grammarian Judah ibn Quraysh of Tiaret in Algeria perceived a relationship between Berber and Semitic (the latter group known to him through Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic). In the course of the 19th century Europeans also began suggesting such relationships; thus in 1844 Th. Benfey suggested a language family containing Semitic, Berber, and Cushitic (calling the latter "Ethiopic"). In the same year, T. N. Newman suggested a relationship between Semitic and Hausa, but this would long remain a topic of dispute and uncertainty. Friedrich Müller named the traditional "Hamito-Semitic" family in 1876 in his Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft, and defined it as consisting of a Semitic group plus a "Hamitic" group containing Egyptian, Berber, and Cushitic; he excluded the Chadic group. These classifications relied in part on non-linguistic anthropological and racial arguments. (See also Hamitic hypothesis.) Leo Reinisch (1909) proposed to link Cushitic and Chadic, while urging a more distant affinity with Egyptian and Semitic, thus foreshadowing Greenberg; but his suggestion found little resonance. Marcel Cohen (1924) rejected the idea of a distinct "Hamitic" subgroup, and included Hausa (a Chadic language) in his comparative Hamito-Semitic vocabulary. Joseph Greenberg (1950) strongly confirmed Cohen's rejection of "Hamitic", added (and sub-classified) the Chadic languages, and proposed the new name Afro-Asiatic for the family; almost all scholars accepted his classification. In 1969 Harold Fleming proposed the recognition of Omotic as a fifth branch, rather than (as previously believed) a subgroup of Cushitic, and this has met with general acceptance. Several scholars, including Harold Fleming and Robert Hetzron, have since questioned the traditional inclusion of Beja in Cushitic, but this view has yet to gain general acceptance. Little agreement exists on the sub-classification of the five or six branches mentioned; however, Christopher Ehret (1979), Harold Fleming (1981), and Joseph Greenberg (1981) all agree that the Omotic branch to split from the rest first. Otherwise: See also Etymological bibliography Some of the main sources for Afro-Asiatic etymologies include: Sources | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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