Afro-Asiatic languages

Afro-Asiatic languages (since -11,000) are those languages spoken mainly in northern Africa and South West Asia: Arabic, Hausa, Hebrew, Aramaic, Somali, Ancient Egyptian, etc. More or less what the Bible calls the sons of Ham and Shem. In fact, before 1970, the more common name for these languages was Hamito-Semitic.

There are six main branches. Listed roughly in order of age:

• Cushitic – Ethiopia and Somalia
• Omotic – Ethiopia
• Egyptian – Egypt
• Chadic – Chad, Niger, northern Nigeria
• Berber – north-west Africa
• Semitic – South West Asia, part of Ethiopia and the Arabic-speaking world

The Egyptian branch, which featured Ancient Egyptian and Coptic (two stages of the same language), has only a few hundred fluent speakers left. You mainly hear it at Coptic church services.

There are 300 or so Afro-Asiatic languages. Here are some of the larger ones (a rough idea of how many million speakers is given in parentheses. Those in bold have over 10 million speakers. Those in italics are dead):

• Afro-Asiatic
  • Cushitic
    • Beja (1 million speakers)
    • Highland East
      • Sidamo (3)
      • Haddiya (2)
    • Lowland East
      • Oromo (34)
      • Somali (15)
      • Afar (2)
  • Omotic
    • North Omotic
      • Gamo-Gofa-Dawro (2)
      • Wolaytta (2)
  • Egyptian
    • Ancient Egyptian / Coptic (0.0003?)
  • Chadic
    • West Chadic
      • Hausa (49)
  • Berber
    • Guanche (Canary Islands, spoken till the 1600s)
    • Tuareg (1)
    • Northern Berber (22)
      • Kabyle (6)
      • Tashelhit (4)
      • Atlas Tamazight (3)
      • Shawiya (1)
  • Semitic
    • East Semitic
      • Akkadian (spoken from -2900 to -700)
    • Central Semitic
      • Phoenician
        • Punic (-800 to +500)
      • Hebrew (5)
      • Ammonite
      • Moabite (-1000 to -500)
      • Edomite
      • Ugaritic (-1400 to -1100)
      • Amorite
      • Aramaic (0.4) – aka Chaldean, Syrian, Syriac or Assyrian
      • Arabic (452)
        • Maltese (0.5)
    • Southern Semitic
      • Ge’ez (400 to 1000)
        • Amharic (29)
        • Tigrinya (7)
        • Tigre (1)

Religion plays a big part in keeping some of these languages going:

• Arabic, the language of the Koran, was spread by Islam.
• Aramaic and Coptic were kept alive by Christians.
• Hebrew, saved by the Bible, was brought back to life by Jews.

Proto-Afro-Asiatic: All of these languages came from a single language, called Proto-Afro-Asiatic. It was spoken maybe 13,000 years ago, give or take 3,000. No one knows for sure where. Some say it was in Ethiopia, others say in South West Asia (Babel, perchance?), others say the Sahara, which back then had lakes and grass and game animals.

One way Afro-Asiatic languages may have spread, -8,000 to -3,000.

Over the past 4,000 years, the region where Afro-Asiatic languages are spoken has not changed all that much. Languages like Arabic, Aramaic and Phoenician have spread mostly within the Afro-Asiatic range.

The main language in Mesopotamia (Iraq):

• 4,000 years ago: Akkadian
• 2,000 years ago: Aramaic
• 0 years ago: Arabic

But these are not hugely different languages. Sumerian, though, which was common before the rise of Akkadian, was not an Afro-Asiatic language at all. No one knows where it came from. Akkadian was written in Sumerian cuneiform, but it was a bad fit.

hieroglyphics, circa -2250.

Writing: Afro-Asiatic languages were among the first to be written down. The two main kinds of writing that Afro-Asiatics invented, both in Egypt, were hieroglyphics (by -3500) and the alphabet (by -2000).

The first alphabets had no vowels. That is because in Afro-Asiatic languages the base meaning of a word is carried by the consonants. Vowels only add twists on that meaning. There are words like that in English – like, sing, sang, sung, song – but in Afro-Asiatic languages it is the common pattern.

– Abagond, 2016.

See also:

• languages
  • Arabic
  • Hebrew
  • Aramaic
  • Egyptian
• alphabet
• Egyptian hieroglyphics
• Ethiopia
• Oromia
• Jews
• Africa: the last 13,000 years
• Proto-Indo-European

529