Afro-Asiatic languages, also called Afrasian languages, formerly Hamito-Semitic, Semito-Hamitic, or Erythraean languages, languages of common origin found in the northern part of Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and some islands and adjacent areas in Western Asia. About 250 Afro-Asiatic languages are spoken today by a total of approximately 250 million people. Numbers of speakers per language range from about 150 million, as in the case of Arabic, to only a few hundred, as in the case of some Cushitic and Chadic languages.
The name Afro-Asiatic gained wide acceptance following the classification of African languages proposed in 1955–63 by the American linguist Joseph H. Greenberg. Scholars in the former Soviet Union prefer to call these languages “Afrasian.” The name Hamito-Semitic (or Semito-Hamitic), although occasionally still used, is largely considered obsolete; many scholars reject it because it is linguistically wrong—there is no linguistic entity “Hamitic” to be contrasted, as a whole, to “Semitic.” Other designations, such as Erythraean and Lisramic, have gained little acceptance.
Relation to other language groups
Origins
The common ancestral dialect cluster from which all modern and extinct Afro-Asiatic languages are assumed to have originated is referred to as Proto-Afro-Asiatic. Proto-Afro-Asiatic is of great antiquity; experts tend to place it in the Mesolithic Period at about 15,000–10,000 bce. There is no general consensus over the location of the Urheimat, the original homeland from which began the migrations into the present locations of the speakers. The doyen of Afrasian studies in the former Soviet Union, Igor Diakonoff, theorized that it arose in what is now the Sahara, from where several subsequent migrations took place after about 5000 bce, including the exit from Africa by speakers of what would become the Semitic languages. Diakonoff accounted for the considerable linguistic diversity of Afro-Asiatic languages by suggesting that there was extensive interethnic and interlanguage contact throughout the region. Largely extralinguistic research based on the “out of Africa” theory for Homo sapiens sapiens has since placed the Urheimat in the Middle East—in the Fertile Crescent, one of the regions in which agriculture developed (c. 10,000 bce). This would mean that speakers of Proto-Afro-Asiatic dialects migrated back into Africa via the Sinai Peninsula and the Nile River valley before they eventually reached the ancient and present locations of the five constituent language families in Africa—i.e., Egyptian (Nile valley), Amazigh (Berber; North Africa and central Sahara), Chadic (Central Africa, Lake Chad basin), Cushitic (Horn of Africa), and Omotic (southwestern Ethiopia). Much later migrations from South Arabia brought some Semitic languages into Eritrea and Ethiopia, again to be followed by the expansion of Arabic in the Islamic period.
Speakers of Afro-Asiatic languages were among the first in human history to develop writing systems. Some Afro-Asiatic languages are known only from documents written as long as 5,000 years ago; examples include Akkadian and Eblaite. Some have disappeared but left traces in the form of inscriptions; Old Libyan, for example, is found in inscriptions dated as early as 139 bce. Others are mentioned in records that were transcribed in European languages, as is the case of the Guanche language of the Canary Islands. Coptic represents a third case; it originated in antiquity and was spoken until the 16th or 17th century ce but is now represented only by liturgical phrases used within the Coptic Orthodox Church.
Divisions within the phylum
Linguists generally recognize six divisions within the Afro-Asiatic phylum: Amazigh (Berber), Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Omotic, and Semitic. These divisions differ in both the number of languages and the degree of genetic relationship as measured in terms of common inherited vocabulary and shared grammatical features, issues considered at further length below (see also comparative linguistics; historical linguistics). The degree of kinship between the divisions and subdivisions appears to be much more remote than that between the branches of Indo-European. However, none of the existing proposals concerning the relationship of divisions within the phylum can be considered final. Neither is there general agreement as to the subdivisions within the six major divisions. Some authors, for lack of robust evidence for subclassification, still follow Greenberg by accepting five coordinate branches within Afro-Asiatic (or six, including Omotic in a separate family). Others may favour a series of binary subdivisions such as those represented in the accompanying genealogy.
External relations
Certain similarities to Indo-European languages have prompted scholars to look for a special relationship between Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European. Some scholars even extend this kinship hypothesis to include the Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian, and Dravidian language groups. Attempts have also been made to relate Afro-Asiatic to other African and European linguistic units, such as Niger-Congo, Nilo-Saharan, or Basque. However, the common ancestor of these languages, if there was one, existed so long ago that it is almost impossible to apply sound comparative methods to modern languages in order to test this hypothesis.
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