Hamito-Semitic
Hamito-Semitic Languages, principal language
family of northern Africa and the Middle East. Estimated at
having around 200 million speakers, the family is called Afro-Asiatic
by some scholars because of its geographic distribution. It
is thought to have derived from a parent language that existed
around the 7th century bc and the oldest languages of the
group date from the 3rd millennium bc. The name Hamito-Semitic,
although traditional, is somewhat misleading, because it reflects
a now-discredited idea that the family has two main branches.
Actually, the Hamito-Semitic family has six equally independent
branches or subfamilies: Semitic, Berber, Egyptian, Cushitic,
Omotic, and Chadic. These six branches display enough similarities
of grammar, word formation, sound systems, and vocabulary
to indicate that they descended from a common ancestor. (The
relationship of some or all of the Chadic languages to the
family, however, is disputed by some scholars.) The Semitic languages include the Arabic
language and the Hebrew language, as well as Amharic (the
official language of Ethiopia) and ancient tongues such as
the Assyro-Babylonian language or Akkadian, the Aramaic language,
Phoenician, Moabite, and so forth. The Egyptian branch of
Hamito-Semitic consists of the ancient Egyptian language,
including its last phase, the Coptic language, which survived
until about the 14th century. The Berber branch of the Hamito-Semitic
family includes Tuareg and other languages of northern and
north-western Africa and has around 12 million speakers. Many
Berber-speaking people are bilingual, using Arabic as well,
and the Berber languages are written in the Arabic script.
The Cushitic languages are spoken by around 13 million in
Ethiopia and Somalia, along the Red Sea; they include Orominga
(spoken in Kenya and southern Ethiopia), written in the Ethiopic
script, and Somali, written in the Latin alphabet. The Chadic
languages are spoken in central and West Africa. The most
important of these is Hausa, native to northern Nigeria and
neighbouring areas, but also serving as a regional lingua
franca spoken by millions of nonnative speakers. Traditionally
written in Arabic, in the 20th century Hausa began to be written
in the Latin alphabet. There are over 20 Omotic languages,
spoken by nearly 2 million people in western Ethiopia and
northern Kenya.
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