The languages of Africa are divided into several major language families: The Omotic languages are group of languages spoken in southwestern Ethiopia. Turkish is one of the Turkic languages of the Altaic language family, one of the world's major l…, Pashto (Pushto) One of the two major languages of Afghanistan, the other being Persian. 'Links between Cushitic, Omotic, Chadic and the position of Kujarge'. About 495 million people speak an Afroasiatic language as their first language. 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. There are two etymological dictionaries of Afroasiatic, one by Christopher Ehret, and one by Vladimir Orel and Olga Stolbova. By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Hozo language is also known as Begi-Mao and Mao of Begi. These dates are older than those associated with other proto-languages. . Greenberg, Joseph H. 1981. [10] In the course of the 19th century, Europeans also began suggesting such relationships. This "Hamitic language group" was proposed to unite various, mainly North-African, languages, including the Ancient Egyptian language, the Berber languages, the Cushitic languages, the Beja language, and the Chadic languages. The two dictionaries disagree on almost everything. Numbers of speakers per language Neither is there general agreement as to the subdivisions within the six major divisions. In Christopher Moseley, ed.. Finnegan, Ruth H. 1970. These languages are believed to have been originally spoken by Southern Cushitic agro-pastoralists from Ethiopia, who in the third millennium BC began migrating southward into the Great Rift Valley. Proto-Afro-Asiatic is of great antiquity; experts tend to place it in the Mesolithic Period at about 15,000–10,000 bce. Thereafter Berbers lived as an independent people in North Africa, including the Tunisian region. [8] He also added (and sub-classified) the Chadic languages, and proposed the new name Afroasiatic for the family. [9] By the 1860s, the main constituent elements within the broader Afroasiatic family had been worked out. Privacy Policy Their distribution seems to have been influenced by the Sahara pump operating over the last 10,000 years. With a total number of speakers estimated at more than 300 million, it is spread throughout North Africa, the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East. These works include monographic articles on Bantu subclassification; on internal reconstruction in Semitic; on the reconstruction of proto-Cushitic and proto-Eastern Cushitic; and, with Mohamed Nuuh Ali, on the classification of the Soomaali languages. ." FEN Learning is part of Sandbox Networks, a digital learning company that operates education services and products for the 21st century. Linguists generally recognize six divisions within the Afro-Asiatic phylum: Amazigh (Berber), Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Omotic, and Semitic. They are fairly agglutinative and have complex tonal systems. Many Afro-Asiatic languages do not have writing systems. In 1844, Theodor Benfey suggested a language family consisting of Semitic, Berber, and Cushitic (calling the latter "Ethiopic"). [32] Meinhof's system of classification of the Hamitic languages was based on a belief that "speakers of Hamitic became largely coterminous with cattle herding peoples with essentially Caucasian origins, intrinsically different from and superior to the 'Negroes of Africa'." Sands, Bonny E. (1998) 'Eastern and Southern African Khoisan: evaluating claims of distant linguistic relationships.' The Ge'ez script is used to write some of the Omotic languages, the Latin script for some others. Afro-Asiatic languages are written in several scripts. Certain similarities to Indo-European languages have prompted scholars to look for a special relationship between Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European. Orel, Vladimir E. and Olga V. Stolbova. Schloezer in 1781 to the language family to which Hebrew belongs because the languages then reckoned among…, Türkçe; official language of the Republic of Turkey. / World Encyclopedia. Afroasiatic languages are found across North Africa and throughout much of East Africa and the Middle East. Blench R (2006) Archaeology, Language, and the African Past, Rowman Altamira. This page was last changed on 22 September 2020, at 14:19. 2009. Large language family of Africa and West Asia, "Afro-Asiatic" redirects here. Some of the major ones are listed below. Afroasiatic languages - WikiMili, The Fr Some Afro-Asiatic languages are known only from documents written as long as 5,000 years ago; examples include Akkadian and Eblaite. A de facto group of distinct language varieties within the Semitic branch, the languages that evolved from Proto-Arabic have around 313 million native speakers, concentrated primarily in West Asia and North Africa. MustGo.com. Christopher Ehret, who currently holds the position of Distinguished Research Professor at UCLA, is an American scholar of African history and African historical linguistics particularly known for his efforts to correlate linguistic taxonomy and reconstruction with the archeological record. Therefore, that information is unavailable for most Encyclopedia.com content. As an adherent of the Four Field School of American anthropology, he stresses the integration of physical anthropology, linguistics, archaeology, and cultural anthropology in solving anthropological problems. The main theories of Urheimat are the Levant/Fertile Crescent, [44] [45] [46] the Eastern Sahara, [47] [48] [49] [50] [51] North Africa and the Horn of Africa. Within the “Cite this article” tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. Therefore, be sure to refer to those guidelines when editing your bibliography or works cited list. The Cushitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. However, his suggestion found little acceptance. Its classification is Afro-Asiatic, Omotic, and Mao. Diakonoff accounted for the considerable linguistic diversity of Afro-Asiatic languages by suggesting that there was extensive interethnic and interlanguage contact throughout the region. Both authors used the skin-color, mode of subsistence, and other characteristics of native speakers as part of their arguments that particular languages should be grouped together. Retrieved October 16, 2020 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/environment/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/afro-asiatic-languages. Köln: Köppe. However, several proposals grouping Afroasiatic with one or more other language families have been made. There are around 300 Afroasiatic languages that are still spoken. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. Communication in the English language is much more popular in the country's urban communities than it is in the rural areas, due to globalization. [ citation needed ], 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. At a later date, some Semitic speakers returned from Arabia to Africa. In R.D. Dimmendaal, Gerrit, and Erhard Voeltz. Afroasiatic (Afro-Asiatic), also called Afrasian or Hamito-Semitic[1] or Semito-Hamitic,[2], is a large language family. The official language of Nigeria is English, the former language of colonial British Nigeria. Our editors update and regularly refine this enormous body of information to bring you reliable information. Proto-Afroasiatic) was spoken, are yet to be agreed upon by historical linguists. However, it did not come into general use until Joseph Greenberg (1950) formally proposed its adoption. Diakonoff, Igor M. 1996. They fall within a range between approximately 7,500 BC (9,500 years ago), and approximately 16,000 BC (18,000 years ago). [ citation needed ] It was the Egyptologist Karl Richard Lepsius (1810–1884) who restricted Hamitic to the non-Semitic languages in Africa, which are characterized by a grammatical gender system. Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. Language, Linguistics, and Literary Terms. We've got you covered with our map collection. (October 16, 2020). The majority of them are spoken by fewer than 100,000 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. They are mainly spoken in Western Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and parts of the Sahel. Relationships among the Afro-Asiatic protolanguages. "Africa’s linguistic diversity". For other uses, see, Distribution of the Afro-Asiatic languages, The references used may be made clearer with a different or consistent style of. Proto–Afroasiatic, sometimes referred to as Proto-Afrasian, is the reconstructed proto-language from which all modern Afroasiatic languages are descended. Proto-Berber or Proto-Libyan is the reconstructed proto-language from which the modern Berber languages descend. They are spoken in parts of the Sahel. Journal of Afroasiatic Languages, History and Culture Volume 8, Number 1, 2019 Journal of Afroasiatic Languages, History and Culture. Lowland East Cushitic is a group of roughly two dozen diverse languages of the Cushitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic family. The degree of kinship between the divisions and subdivisions appears to be much more remote than that between the branches of Indo-European. The group is generally classified as belonging to the Afroasiatic language family, but this is disputed by some. The Mao languages are the least documented within Omotic, and Omotic itself is the least documented of the Afroasiatic groups. "The earliest Semitic society: Linguistic data.". [34]. In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations.