Six Branches Across Two Continents

Afro-Asiatic runs from the Atlantic coast of Morocco to the Persian Gulf and south into Kenya and Nigeria, and it is one of the oldest families whose existence nobody seriously disputes. Six branches are usually counted: Semitic, Egyptian, Berber, Cushitic, Chadic and Omotic. Egyptian is the only one that is a single language, and it is also the one with the longest continuous written record of any language on earth, running from the third millennium BCE through to Coptic. Chadic is the largest by language count and includes Hausa, which alone has more speakers than most families in this atlas. What makes the family hard is its age.

The branches separated long enough ago that the shared inheritance is thin, sound correspondences are difficult to establish across the whole, and the internal tree is still argued over: Omotic in particular is periodically proposed for expulsion. That difficulty is worth stating rather than glossing, because a reader who sees a confident six-branch diagram should know that the diagram is a summary of an argument and not a photograph. The homeland is contested on the same grounds. Five branches are African and one is mostly not, which is the main case for an African origin, and the alternative places it in the Levant with Semitic as the branch that never left.