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Based on typological differences with the other Cushitic languages, Robert Hetzron proposed that Beja has to be removed from Cushitic, thus forming an independent branch of Afroasiatic. Most scholars, however, reject this proposal, and continue to group Beja as the sole member of a Northern branch within Cushitic. |
Glottolog does not accept that the inclusion or even unity of Omotic has been established, nor that of Ongota or the unclassified Kujarge. It therefore splits off the following groups as small families: South Omotic, Mao, Dizoid, Gonga–Gimojan (North Omotic apart from the preceding), Ongota, and Kujarge. |
Subgrouping |
Little agreement exists on the subgrouping of the five or six branches of Afroasiatic: Semitic, Egyptian, Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, and Omotic. However, Christopher Ehret (1979), Harold Fleming (1981), and Joseph Greenberg (1981) all agree that the Omotic branch split from the rest first. |
Otherwise: |
Paul Newman (1980) groups Berber with Chadic and Egyptian with Semitic, while questioning the inclusion of Omotic in Afroasiatic. Rolf Theil (2006) concurs with the exclusion of Omotic but does not otherwise address the structure of the family. |
Harold Fleming (1981) divides non-Omotic Afroasiatic, or "Erythraean", into three groups, Cushitic, Semitic, and Chadic-Berber-Egyptian. He later added Semitic and Beja to Chadic-Berber-Egyptian and tentatively proposed Ongota as a new third branch of Erythraean. He thus divided Afroasiatic into two major branches, Om... |
Like Harold Fleming, Christopher Ehret (1995: 490) divides Afroasiatic into two branches, Omotic and Erythrean. He divides Omotic into two branches, North Omotic and South Omotic. He divides Erythrean into Cushitic, comprising Beja, Agaw, and East-South Cushitic, and North Erythrean, comprising Chadic and "Boreafrasia... |
Vladimir Orel and Olga Stolbova (1995) group Berber with Semitic and Chadic with Egyptian. They split up Cushitic into five or more independent branches of Afroasiatic, viewing Cushitic as a Sprachbund rather than a language family. |
Igor M. Diakonoff (1996) subdivides Afroasiatic in two, grouping Berber, Cushitic, and Semitic together as East-West Afrasian (ESA), and Chadic with Egyptian as North-South Afrasian (NSA). He excludes Omotic from Afroasiatic. |
Lionel Bender (1997) groups Berber, Cushitic, and Semitic together as "Macro-Cushitic". He regards Chadic and Omotic as the branches of Afroasiatic most remote from the others. |
Alexander Militarev (2000), on the basis of lexicostatistics, groups Berber with Chadic and both more distantly with Semitic, as against Cushitic and Omotic. He places Ongota in South Omotic. |
Position among the world's languages |
Afroasiatic is one of the four major language families spoken in Africa identified by Joseph Greenberg in his book The Languages of Africa (1963). It is one of the few whose speech area is transcontinental, with languages from Afroasiatic's Semitic branch also spoken in the Middle East and Europe. |
There are no generally accepted relations between Afroasiatic and any other language family. However, several proposals grouping Afroasiatic with one or more other language families have been made. The best-known of these are the following: |
Hermann Möller (1906) argued for a relation between Semitic and the Indo-European languages. This proposal was accepted by a few linguists (e.g. Holger Pedersen and Louis Hjelmslev). (For a fuller account, see Indo-Semitic languages.) However, the theory has little currency today, although most linguists do not deny t... |
Apparently influenced by Möller (a colleague of his at the University of Copenhagen), Holger Pedersen included Hamito-Semitic (the term replaced by Afroasiatic) in his proposed Nostratic macro-family (cf. Pedersen 1931:336–338), also included the Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Yukaghir languages, and Dravidian languag... |
Joseph Greenberg (2000–2002) did not reject a relationship of Afroasiatic to these other languages, but he considered it more distantly related to them than they were to each other, grouping instead these other languages in a separate macro-family, which he called Eurasiatic, and to which he added Chukotian, Gilyak, K... |
Most recently, Sergei Starostin's school has accepted Eurasiatic as a subgroup of Nostratic, with Afroasiatic, Dravidian, and Kartvelian in Nostratic outside of Eurasiatic. The even larger Borean super-family contains Nostratic as well as Dené-Caucasian and Austric. |
Date of Afroasiatic |
The earliest written evidence of an Afroasiatic language is an Ancient Egyptian inscription dated to c. 3400 BC (5,400 years ago). Symbols on Gerzean (Naqada II) pottery resembling Egyptian hieroglyphs date back to c. 4000 BC, suggesting an earlier possible dating. This gives us a minimum date for the age of Afroasiati... |
Afroasiatic Urheimat |
The Afroasiatic urheimat, the hypothetical place where Proto-Afroasiatic language speakers lived in a single linguistic community, or complex of communities, before this original language dispersed geographically and divided into distinct languages, is unknown. Afroasiatic languages are today primarily spoken in West A... |
While there is no definitive agreement on when or where the original homeland of this language family existed, many link the first speakers to the first farmers in the Levant who would later spread to North and East Africa. Others argue the first speakers were pre-agricultural and based in North East Africa. |
Similarities in grammar and syntax |
Widespread (though not universal) features of the Afroasiatic languages include: |
A set of emphatic consonants, variously realized as glottalized, pharyngealized, or implosive. |
VSO typology with SVO tendencies. |
A two-gender system in the singular, with the feminine marked by the sound /t/. |
All Afroasiatic subfamilies show evidence of a causative affix s. |
Semitic, Berber, Cushitic (including Beja), and Chadic support possessive suffixes. |
Nisba derivation in -j (earlier Egyptian) or -ī (Semitic) |
Morphology in which words inflect by changes within the root (vowel changes or gemination) as well as with prefixes and suffixes. |
One of the most remarkable shared features among the Afroasiatic languages is the prefixing verb conjugation (see the table at the start of this section), with a distinctive pattern of prefixes beginning with /ʔ t n y/, and in particular a pattern whereby third-singular masculine /y-/ is opposed to third-singular femin... |
According to Ehret (1996), tonal languages appear in the Omotic and Chadic branches of Afroasiatic, as well as in certain Cushitic languages. The Semitic, Berber and Egyptian branches generally do not use tones phonemically. |
The Berber and Semitic branches share certain grammatical features (e.g. alternative feminine endings *-ay/*-āy; corresponding vowel templates for verbal conjugations) which can be reconstructed for a higher-order proto-language (provisionally called "Proto-Berbero-Semitic" by Kossmann & Suchard (2018) and Putten (2018... |
Shared vocabulary |
The following are some examples of Afroasiatic cognates, including ten pronouns, three nouns, and three verbs. |
Source: Christopher Ehret, Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). |
Note: Ehret does not make use of Berber in his etymologies, stating (1995: 12): "the kind of extensive reconstruction of proto-Berber lexicon that might help in sorting through alternative possible etymologies is not yet available." The Berber cognates here are taken from the previous version of the table in this artic... |
Abbreviations: NOm = 'North Omotic', SOm = 'South Omotic'. MSA = 'Modern South Arabian', PSC = 'Proto-Southern Cushitic', PSom-II = 'Proto-Somali, stage 2'. masc. = 'masculine', fem. = 'feminine', sing. = 'singular', pl. = 'plural'. 1s. = 'first person singular', 2s. = 'second person singular'. |
Symbols: Following Ehret (1995: 70), a caron ˇ over a vowel indicates rising tone, and a circumflex ^ over a vowel indicates falling tone. V indicates a vowel of unknown quality. Ɂ indicates a glottal stop. * indicates reconstructed forms based on comparison of related languages. |
There are two etymological dictionaries of Afroasiatic, one by Christopher Ehret, and one by Vladimir Orel and Olga Stolbova. The two dictionaries disagree on almost everything. The following table contains the thirty roots or so (out of thousands) that represent a fragile consensus of present research: |
Etymological bibliography |
Some of the main sources for Afroasiatic etymologies include: |
Cohen, Marcel. 1947. Essai comparatif sur le vocabulaire et la phonétique du chamito-sémitique. Paris: Champion. |
Diakonoff, Igor M. et al. 1993–1997. "Historical-comparative vocabulary of Afrasian," St. Petersburg Journal of African Studies 2–6. |
Ehret, Christopher. 1995. Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic (Proto-Afrasian): Vowels, Tone, Consonants, and Vocabulary (= University of California Publications in Linguistics 126). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. |
Orel, Vladimir E. and Olga V. Stolbova. 1995. Hamito-Semitic Etymological Dictionary: Materials for a Reconstruction. Leiden: Brill. . |
See also |
Afroasiatic phonetic notation |
Borean languages |
Indo-European languages |
Indo-Semitic languages |
Languages of Africa |
Languages of Asia |
Languages of Europe |
Nostratic languages |
Proto-Afroasiatic language |
References |
Citations |
Works cited |
General references |
Anthony, David. 2007. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. |
Bender, Lionel et al. 2003. Selected Comparative-Historical Afro-Asiatic Studies in Memory of Igor M. Diakonoff. LINCOM. |
Bomhard, Alan R. 1996. Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis. Signum. |
Diakonoff, Igor M. 1988. Afrasian Languages. Moscow: Nauka. |
Diakonoff, Igor M. 1996. "Some reflections on the Afrasian linguistic macrofamily." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 55, 293. |
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