The
Afroasiatic languages constitute a
language family with about 375 living
languages (
SIL estimate) and more
than 350 million speakers spread throughout
North Africa, the
Horn of Africa, and
Southwest Asia, as well as parts of the
Sahel,
West Africa
and
East Africa.
Arabic is the most widespread Afroasiatic language
with over 280 million native speakers. Afroasiatic also includes
several ancient languages, such as
Ancient Egyptian,
Biblical Hebrew, and
Akkadian.
The term "Afroasiatic" (often now spelled as Afro-Asiatic) was
coined by
Maurice Delafosse
(1914). It did not come into general use until it was adopted by
Joseph Greenberg (1950) to replace
the earlier term "Hamito-Semitic", following his demonstration that
Hamitic is not a valid language family. The
term "Hamito-Semitic" remains in use in the academic traditions of
some European countries, although some authors have now replaced it
with "Afrasian", or, reflecting an opinion that it is more African
than Asian, "Afrasan". Individual scholars have called the family
"Erythraean" (Tucker 1966) and "Lisramic" (Hodge 1972).
Distribution and branches
Some linguists' proposals for grouping
within Afroasiatic
The Afroasiatic language family is usually considered to include
the following branches:
While there is general agreement on these six families, there are
some points of disagreement among
linguists who study Afroasiatic. In particular:
- Omotic is the most controversial member of Afroasiatic since
the grammatical formatives "to which Afroasiaticists have tended to
attach the greatest importance are either absent or distinctly
wobbly" (Hayward 1995). Greenberg (1963) and others considered it a
subgroup of Cushitic, while others have raised doubts about it
being part of Afroasiatic at all (e.g. Theil 2006).
- The Afroasiatic identity of Ongota is 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.
Sands (2009) believes the most convincing proposal is Savà &
Tosco (2003), that Ongota is East Cushitic with a Nilo-Saharan
substratum. In other words, the Ongota
would appear to have once spoken a Nilo-Saharan language but then
shifted to speaking a Cushitic language, while retaining some
characteristics of their earlier Nilo-Saharan language.
- Beja is sometimes listed as a
separate branch of Afroasiatic but is more often included in the
Cushitic branch, which has a high degree of internal
diversity.
- Whether the various branches of Cushitic actually form a
language family is sometimes questioned, but not their inclusion in
Afroasiatic itself.
- There is no consensus on the interrelationships of the five
non-Omotic branches of Afroasiatic (see "Overview of
classifications" below). This situation is not unusual, even among
long-established language families: there are also many
disagreements concerning the internal classification of the
Indo-European languages, for
instance.
Classification history
Medieval scholars sometimes linked two or more branches of
Afroasiatic together.
As early as the 9th century, the Hebrew
grammarian Judah ibn Quraysh of
Tiaret
in Algeria
perceived a
relationship between Berber and Semitic. He knew of Semitic
through Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic.
In the course of the 19th century, Europeans also began suggesting
such relationships. In 1844,
Theodor
Benfey suggested a language family consisting of Semitic,
Berber, and Cushitic (calling the latter "Ethiopic"). In the same
year, T.N. Newman suggested a relationship between Semitic and
Hausa, but this would long remain a topic of dispute and
uncertainty.
Friedrich Müller
named the traditional "Hamito-Semitic" family in 1876 in his
Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft. He defined it as
consisting of a Semitic group plus a "Hamitic" group containing
Egyptian, Berber, and Cushitic; he excluded the Chadic group. These
classifications relied in part on non-linguistic anthropological
and racial arguments (see
Hamitic
hypothesis).
Leo Reinisch (1909) proposed linking Cushitic and Chadic, while
urging a more distant affinity to Egyptian and Semitic, thus
foreshadowing Greenberg, but his suggestion found little
resonance.
Marcel Cohen (1924) rejected the idea
of a distinct Hamitic subgroup and included Hausa (a Chadic
language) in his comparative Hamito-Semitic vocabulary.
Joseph Greenberg (1950) strongly
confirmed Cohen's rejection of "Hamitic", added (and
sub-classified) the Chadic branch, and proposed the new name
"Afroasiatic" for the family. Nearly all scholars have accepted
Greenberg's classification.
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.
Several scholars, including Harold Fleming and
Robert Hetzron, have since questioned the
traditional inclusion of Beja in Cushitic.
Subgrouping
| Greenberg (1963) |
Newman (1980) |
Fleming (post-1981) |
Ehret (1995) |
- Semitic
- Egyptian
- Berber
- Cushitic
- Western Cushitic
(equals Omotic)
- Chadic
|
- Berber-Chadic
- Egypto-Semitic
- Cushitic
(excludes Omotic) |
- Omotic
- Erythraean:
- Cushitic
- Ongota
- Non-Ethiopian:
- Chadic
- Berber
- Egyptian
- Semitic
- Beja
|
- Omotic
- Cushitic
- Chadic
- North Afro-Asiatic:
|
| Orel & Stobova (1995) |
Diakonoff (1996) |
Bender (1997) |
Militarev (2000) |
- Berber-Semitic
- Chadic-Egyptian
- Omotic
- Beja
- Agaw
- Sidamic
- East Lowlands
- Rift
|
- East-West Afrasian:
- North-South Afrasian:
(excludes Omotic) |
- Omotic
- Chadic
- Macro-Cushitic:
|
- North Afrasian:
- African North Afrasian:
- Semitic
- South Afrasian:
|
Little agreement exists on the
subgrouping of the five or six
branches of Afroasiatic: Semitic, Egyptian, Berber, Chadic,
Cushitic, and Omotic (if Omotic is not included in Cushitic).
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, Omotic and
Erythraean, with Erythraean consisting of three sub-branches,
Cushitic, Chadic-Berber-Egyptian-Semitic-Beja, and Ongota.
- 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.
- Christopher Ehret (1995)
groups Egyptian, Berber, and Semitic together in a "North
Afro-Asiatic" subgroup.
- 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.
Position among the world's languages
Afroasiatic is one of the four
language families of Africa identified
by Joseph Greenberg in his book
The Languages of Africa
(1963). It is the only one that extends outside of Africa, via the
Semitic branch.
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 some linguists (e.g. Holger Pedersen and Louis Hjelmslev) but has little currency
today.
- 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 language
family (cf. Pedersen 1931:336-338), which also included the
Indo-European, Finno-Ugric,
Samoyed, Turkish, Mongolian, Manchu, and Yukaghir languages. This inclusion was
retained by subsequent Nostraticists, starting with Vladislav Illich-Svitych and
Aharon Dolgopolsky. Like all
aspects of the Nostratic hypothesis, it is highly
controversial.
- 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 language family, which
he called Eurasiatic, and to
which he added Chukotian, Gilyak, Korean, Japanese-Ryukyuan, Eskimo-Aleut, and Ainu.
Origins and common features
Present tense verbal paradigms in several Afroasiatic
languages:
| number |
|
Arabic
write
|
Coptic
die
|
Kabyle
fly
|
Somali
bring
|
Beja
eat
|
Hausa
drink
|
| singular |
1 |
ˀaktubu |
timou |
ttafgeɣ |
keenaa |
tamáni |
ina shan |
| 2f |
taktubīna |
temou |
tettafgeḍ |
keentaa |
tamtínii |
kina shan |
| 2m |
taktubu |
kmou |
tamtíniya |
kana shan |
| 3f |
smou |
tettafeg |
tamtíni |
tana shan |
| 3m |
yaktubu |
fmou |
yettafeg |
keenaa |
tamíni |
yana shan |
| dual |
2 |
taktubāni |
|
| 3f |
| 3m |
yaktubāni |
| plural |
1 |
naktubu |
tənmou |
nettafeg |
keennaa |
támnay |
muna shan |
| 2m |
taktubūna |
tetənmou |
tettafgem |
keentaan |
támteena |
kuna shan |
| 2f |
taktubna |
tettafgemt |
| 3m |
yaktubūna |
semou |
ttafgen |
keenaan |
támeen |
suna shan |
| 3f |
yaktubna |
ttafgent |
Common features of the Afroasiatic languages include:
- a two-gender system in the
singular, with the feminine marked by the /t/ sound
- VSO typology with SVO tendencies
- a set of emphatic consonants,
variously realized as glottalized, pharyngealized, or
implosive
- a templatic morphology
in which words inflect by internal changes as well as with prefixes
and suffixes
All Afroasiatic subfamilies show evidence of a causative affix
s, but a similar suffix also appears in other groups, such
as the
Niger-Congo
languages.
Semitic, Berber, Cushitic (including Beja), and Chadic support
possessive suffixes.
Tonal languages appear in the Omotic,
Chadic, and Cushitic branches of Afroasiatic, according to Ehret
(1996). The Semitic, Berber, and Egyptian branches do not use tones
phonemically.
Cognates
Some important Afroasiatic
cognates
are:
- b-n- 'build' (Ehret: *bĭn), attested in
Chadic, Semitic (*bny), Cushitic
(*mĭn/*măn 'house'), Berber (*bn) and
Omotic (Dime bin- 'build, create').
- m-t 'die' (Ehret: *maaw), attested in Chadic
(for example, Hausa mutu), Egyptian (mwt
*muwt, mt, Coptic mu), Berber
(mmet, pr. immut), Semitic (*mwt), and
Cushitic (Proto-Somali *umaaw/*-am-w(t)- 'die').
Also Mot, Canaanite god
of death.
- s-n 'know', attested in Chadic, Berber, Egyptian and
Semitic (Hebrew š-n 'learn, study').
- l-s 'tongue' (Ehret: *lis' 'to lick'),
attested in Semitic (*lasaan/lisaan), Egyptian
(ns *ls, Coptic las), Berber
(ils), Chadic (for example, Hausa harshe), and
possibly Omotic (Dime lits'- 'lick').
- s-m 'name' (Ehret: *sŭm / *sĭm),
attested in Semitic (*sm), Berber (ism), Chadic
(for example, Hausa suna), Cushitic, and Omotic (though
some see the Berber form, ism, and the Omotic form,
sunts, as Semitic loanwords.) The Egyptian smi
'report, announce' offers another possible cognate.
- d-m 'blood' (Ehret: *dîm / *dâm),
attested in Berber (idammen), Semitic (*dam), and
Chadic. Compare Cushitic *dîm/*dâm, 'red'.
See also
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. 1996. Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic
(Proto-Afrasian): Vowels, Tone, Consonants, and Vocabulary
(University of
California Publications in Linguistics 126). Berkeley,
California.
- Orel, Vladimir E. and Olga V. Stolbova. 1995.
Hamito-Semitic Etymological Dictionary: Materials for a
Reconstruction. Leiden: Brill. ISBN 90-04-10051-2.
References
- Languages of the World
- [1]
- [2]
- Bibliographie Linguistique - Linguistic
Bibliography
Literature
- Barnett, William and John Hoopes (editors). 1995. The
Emergence of Pottery. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution
Press. ISBN 1-56098-517-8
- 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. 1996. "Some reflections on the Afrasian
linguistic macrofamily." Journal of Near Eastern Studies
55, 293.
- Diakonoff, Igor M. 1998. "The earliest Semitic society:
Linguistic data." Journal of Semitic Studies 43, 209.
- Dimmendaal, Gerrit, and Erhard Voeltz. 2007. "Africa". In
Christopher Moseley, ed., Encyclopedia of the world's
endangered languages.
- Ehret, Christopher. 1997. Abstract of "The lessons of deep-time
historical-comparative reconstruction in Afroasiatic: reflections
on Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic: Vowels, Tone, Consonants,
and Vocabulary (U.C. Press, 1995)", paper delivered at the
Twenty-fifth Annual Meeting of the North American Conference on
Afro-Asiatic Linguistics, held in Miami, Florida on March 21-23,
1997.
- Finnegan, Ruth H. 1970. "Afro-Asiatic languages West Africa".
Oral Literature in Africa, pg 558.
- Fleming, Harold C. 2006. Ongota: A Decisive Language in
African Prehistory. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.
- Greenberg, Joseph H. 1950. "Studies
in African linguistic classification: IV. Hamito-Semitic." Southwestern Journal of
Anthropology 6, 47-63.
- Greenberg, Joseph H. 1955. Studies in African Linguistic
Classification. New Haven: Compass Publishing Company.
(Photo-offset reprint of the SJA articles with minor
corrections.)
- Greenberg, Joseph H. 1963. The Languages of Africa.
Bloomington: Indiana University. (Heavily revised version of
Greenberg 1955.)
- Greenberg, Joseph H. 1966. The Languages of Africa
(2nd ed. with additions and corrections). Bloomington: Indiana
University.
- Greenberg, Joseph H. 1981. "African linguistic classification."
General History of Africa, Volume 1: Methodology and African
Prehistory, edited by Joseph Ki-Zerbo, 292–308. Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press.
- Greenberg, Joseph H. 2000–2002. Indo-European and Its
Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, Volume 1:
Grammar, Volume 2: Lexicon. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
- Hayward, R. J. 1995. "The challenge of Omotic: an inaugural
lecture delivered on 17 February 1994". London: School of Oriental
and African Studies, University of London.
- Heine, Bernd and Derek Nurse. 2000. African Languages,
Chapter 4. Cambridge University Press.
- Hodge, Carleton T. (editor). 1971. Afroasiatic: A
Survey. The Hague - Paris: Mouton.
- Hodge, Carleton T. 1991. "Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic." In
Sydney M. Lamb and E. Douglas Mitchell (editors), Sprung from
Some Common Source: Investigations into the Prehistory of
Languages, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press,
141–165.
- Huehnergard, John. 2004. "Afro-Asiatic." In R.D. Woodard
(editor), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient
Languages, Cambridge - New York, 2004, 138–159.
- Militarev, Alexander. "Towards the genetic affiliation of
Ongota, a nearly-extinct language of Ethiopia," 60 pp. In
Orientalia et Classica: Papers of the Institute of Oriental and
Classical Studies, Issue 5. Мoscow. (Forthcoming.)
- Newman, Paul. 1980. The Classification of Chadic within
Afroasiatic. Leiden: Universitaire Pers Leiden.
- Ruhlen, Merritt. 1991. A Guide to the World's
Languages. Stanford, California: Stanford University
Press.
- Sands, Bonny. 2009. "Africa’s Linguistic Diversity". Language
and Linguistics Compass 3/2 (2009): 559–580,
10.1111/j.1749-818x.2008.00124.x
- Theil, R. 2006. Is Omotic Afro-Asiatic? Proceedings from the
David Dwyer retirement symposium, Michigan State University, East
Lansing, 21 October 2006.
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