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Peck, B. M., Comp. (1988). An Enumerative Bibliography of South Asian Language Dictionaries. |
Peiros, Ilia. 1998. Comparative Linguistics in Southeast Asia. Pacific Linguistics Series C, No. 142. Canberra: Australian National University. |
Shorto, Harry L. edited by Sidwell, Paul, Cooper, Doug and Bauer, Christian (2006). A Mon–Khmer comparative dictionary. Canberra: Australian National University. Pacific Linguistics. |
Shorto, H. L. Bibliographies of Mon–Khmer and Tai Linguistics. London oriental bibliographies, v. 2. London: Oxford University Press, 1963. |
van Driem, George. (2007). Austroasiatic phylogeny and the Austroasiatic homeland in light of recent population genetic studies. Mon-Khmer Studies, 37, 1-14. |
Zide, Norman H., and Milton E. Barker. (1966) Studies in Comparative Austroasiatic Linguistics, The Hague: Mouton (Indo-Iranian monographs, v. 5.). |
Further reading |
Mann, Noel, Wendy Smith and Eva Ujlakyova. 2009. Linguistic clusters of Mainland Southeast Asia: an overview of the language families. Chiang Mai: Payap University. |
Sidwell, Paul. 2016. Bibliography of Austroasiatic linguistics and related resources. |
E. K. Brown (ed.) Encyclopedia of Languages and Linguistics. Oxford: Elsevier Press. |
Gregory D. S. Anderson and Norman H. Zide. 2002. Issues in Proto-Munda and Proto-Austroasiatic Nominal Derivation: The Bimoraic Constraint. In Marlys A. Macken (ed.) Papers from the 10th Annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society. Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University, South East Asian Studies Program, Mo... |
External links |
Swadesh lists for Austro-Asiatic languages (from Wiktionary's Swadesh-list appendix) |
Austro-Asiatic at the Linguist List MultiTree Project (not functional as of 2014): Genealogical trees attributed to Sebeok 1942, Pinnow 1959, Diffloth 2005, and Matisoff 2006 |
Mon–Khmer.com: Lectures by Paul Sidwell |
Mon–Khmer Languages Project at SEAlang |
Munda Languages Project at SEAlang |
RWAAI (Repository and Workspace for Austroasiatic Intangible Heritage) |
http://hdl.handle.net/10050/00-0000-0000-0003-66A4-2@view RWAAI Digital Archive |
Michel Ferlus's recordings of Mon-Khmer (Austroasiatic) languages (CNRS) |
Agglutinative languages |
Language families |
Sino-Austronesian languages Afroasiatic (Afro-Asiatic), also known as Afrasian or Hamito-Semitic, Semito-Hamitic, or Erythraean, is a large language family of about 300 languages that are spoken predominantly in Western Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and parts of the Sahel. With the exception of Semitic, all br... |
Afroasiatic languages have over 500 million native speakers, which is the fourth largest number of native speakers of any language family (after Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan and Niger–Congo). The phylum has six branches: Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Semitic, and Omotic; however, the inclusion of Omotic remains co... |
In addition to languages spoken today, Afroasiatic includes several important ancient languages, such as Ancient Egyptian, which forms a distinct branch of the family, and within the Semitic family, Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew and Old Aramaic. There is no consensus among historical linguists concerning the original homel... |
Etymology |
In the early 19th century, linguists grouped the Berber, Cushitic and Egyptian languages within a "Hamitic" phylum, in acknowledgement of these languages' genetic relation with each other and with those in the Semitic phylum. The terms "Hamitic" and "Semitic" were etymologically derived from the Book of Genesis, which ... |
Friedrich Müller introduced the name "Hamito-Semitic" for the entire language family in his Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft (1876). Maurice Delafosse (1914) later coined the term "Afroasiatic" (often now spelled "Afro-Asiatic"). However, it did not come into general use until Joseph Greenberg (1950) formally proposed ... |
Individual scholars have also called the family "Erythraean" (Tucker 1966) and "Lisramic" (Hodge 1972). In lieu of "Hamito-Semitic", the Russian linguist Igor Diakonoff later suggested the term "Afrasian", meaning "half African, half Asiatic", in reference to the geographic distribution of the family's constituent lang... |
Distribution and branches |
Scholars generally treat the Afroasiatic language family as including the following five branches, whereas Omotic is disputed: |
Berber |
Chadic |
Cushitic |
Egyptian |
Semitic |
Although there is general agreement on these six families, linguists who study Afroasiatic raise some points of disagreement, in particular: |
The Omotic language branch is the most controversial member of Afroasiatic because the grammatical formatives to which most linguists have given the greatest weight in classifying languages in the family "are either absent or distinctly wobbly" (Hayward 1995). Greenberg (1963) and others considered it a subgroup of Cu... |
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. Harold Fleming (2006) proposes that Ongota constitutes a separate branch of Afroasiatic. Bonny Sands (2009) ... |
Beja, sometimes listed as a separate branch of Afroasiatic, is more often included in the Cushitic branch, which has a substantial degree of internal diversity. |
There is no consensus on the interrelationships of the five non-Omotic branches of Afroasiatic (see § Subgrouping below). This situation is not unusual, even among long-established language families: scholars also frequently disagree on the internal classification of the Indo-European languages, for instance. |
The extinct Meroitic language has been proposed (Bruce Trigger, 1964, 1977) as an unclassified Afroasiatic language, because it shares the phonotactics characteristic of the family, but there is not enough evidence to secure a classification (Fritz Hintze, 1974, |
The classification of Kujargé within Afroasiatic is not agreed upon. Blench (2008) notes that much of the basic vocabulary looks Cushitic, and speculates that Kujargé could even be a conservative language transitional between Chadic and Cushitic. |
Demographics |
In descending order of the number of speakers, widely-spoken Afroasiatic languages include: |
Arabic (Semitic), the most widely spoken Afroasiatic language, has over 300 million native speakers. |
Hausa (Chadic), the dominant language of northern Nigeria and southern Niger, spoken as a first language by over 40 million people and used as a lingua franca by another 20 million across West Africa and the Sahel. |
Oromo (Cushitic), spoken in Ethiopia and Kenya by around 34 million people. |
Amharic (Semitic), spoken in Ethiopia, with over 25 million native speakers in addition to millions of other Ethiopians speaking it as a second language. |
Somali (Cushitic), spoken by 21.8 million people in Somalia, Somaliland, Djibouti, eastern Ethiopia and northeastern Kenya. |
Tigrinya (Semitic), spoken by around 9.73 million people in Eritrea and Tigray Region of Ethiopia. |
Afar (Cushitic), spoken by around 7.5 million people in Ethiopia, Djibouti, and Eritrea. |
Shilha (Berber), spoken by around 7 million people in Morocco. |
Kabyle (Berber), spoken by around 5.6 million people in Algeria. |
Hebrew (Semitic), spoken by around 5 million native speakers, and additionally by 4 million second-language speakers in Israel and the Jewish diaspora; premodern Hebrew is the liturgical language of Judaism and of the Samaritan people. |
Central Atlas Tamazight (Berber), spoken by around 4.6 million people in Morocco. |
Riffian (Berber), spoken by around 4.2 million people in Morocco. |
Gurage languages (Semitic), a group of languages spoken by more than 2 million people in Ethiopia. |
Tigre (Semitic), spoken by around 2 million people in Eritrea. |
Wolaitta (Omotic), spoken by around 1.6 million people in Ethiopia. |
Maltese (Semitic), spoken by around half a million people in Malta and the Maltese diaspora. It descended from Siculo-Arabic independently from modern Arabic dialects, features Romance superstrates and has been written in the Latin script since at least the 14th century. |
Assyrian Neo-Aramaic (Semitic), a variety of modern Aramaic, spoken by more than 500,000 people in the Assyrian diaspora. |
Classification history |
In the 9th century the Hebrew grammarian Judah ibn Quraysh of Tiaret in Algeria became the first to link two branches of Afroasiatic together; he perceived a relationship between Berber and Semitic. He knew of Semitic through his study of Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic. In the course of the 19th century, Europeans also be... |
Friedrich Müller named the traditional Hamito-Semitic family in 1876 in his Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft ("Outline of Linguistics"), and defined it as consisting of a Semitic group plus a "Hamitic" group containing Egyptian, Berber, and Cushitic; he excluded the Chadic group. It was the Egyptologist Karl Richard L... |
In 1912, Carl Meinhof published Die Sprachen der Hamiten ("The Languages of the Hamites"), in which he expanded Lepsius's model, adding the Fula, Maasai, Bari, Nandi, Sandawe and Hadza languages to the Hamitic group. Meinhof's model was widely supported in the 1940s. Meinhof's system of classification of the Hamitic l... |
Leo Reinisch (1909) had already proposed linking Cushitic and Chadic while urging their more distant affinity with Egyptian and Semitic. However, his suggestion found little acceptance. Marcel Cohen (1924) rejected the idea of a distinct "Hamitic" subgroup and included Hausa (a Chadic language) in his comparative Hamit... |
Greenberg developed his model fully in his book The Languages of Africa (1963), in which he reassigned most of Meinhof's additions to Hamitic to other language families, notably Nilo-Saharan. Following Isaac Schapera and rejecting Meinhof, he classified the Khoekhoe language as a member of the Khoisan languages, a gro... |
Since the three traditional branches of the Hamitic languages (Berber, Cushitic and Egyptian) have not been shown to form an exclusive (monophyletic) phylogenetic unit of their own, separate from other Afroasiatic languages, linguists no longer use the term in this sense. Each of these branches is instead now regarded ... |
In 1969, Harold Fleming proposed that what had previously been known as Western Cushitic is an independent branch of Afroasiatic, suggesting for it the new name "Omotic". This proposal and name have met with widespread acceptance. |
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