Online Language Lessons & Language Training

The Afroasiatic languages constitute a language family with about 375 living languages and more than 500 million speakers spread throughout North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and Southwest Asia, as well as parts of the Sahel, and East Africa. The most widely spoken Afroasiatic language is Arabic, with 230 million speakers. In addition to languages now spoken, Afroasiatic includes several ancient languages, such as Ancient Egyptian, Biblical Hebrew, and Akkadian.

The Afroasiatic language family is usually considered to include the following branches: Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Omotic, Semitic.

The Berber languages are a group of very closely related and similar languages and dialects spoken in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and the Egyptian area of Siwa, as well as by large Berber communities in parts of Niger and Mali.

The Chadic languages constitute a language family spoken across northern Nigeria, Niger, Chad, Central African Republic and Cameroon. The most widely spoken Chadic language is Hausa, the lingua franca of much of West Africa.

The Cushitic languages are spoken in the Horn of Africa, Tanzania, Kenya, Sudan and Egypt. They are named after the Biblical figure Cush by analogy with Shem's being the eponym of Semitic. The most populous Cushitic language is Oromo with about 35 million speakers, followed by Somali with about 15 million speakers, and Sidamo in Ethiopia with about 2 million speakers.

Egyptian is the indigenous language of Egypt. Written records of the Egyptian language have been dated from about 3400 BC, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known. Egyptian was spoken until the late 7th century AD in the form of Coptic. The national language of modern-day Egypt is Egyptian Arabic, which gradually replaced Coptic as the language of daily life in the centuries after the Muslim conquest of Egypt.

The Omotic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic family spoken in southwestern Ethiopia. The Ge'ez alphabet is used to write some Omotic languages, the Roman alphabet for some others.

The Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 467 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa. The most widely spoken Semitic language by far today is Arabic with around 230 million native speakers. It is followed by Amharic (27 million), Tigrinya (5.8 million), and Hebrew (about 5 million). Semitic languages are attested in written form from a very early date, with texts in Eblaite and Akkadian appearing from around the middle of the third millennium BC, written in a script adapted from Sumerian cuneiform. The other scripts used to write Semitic languages are alphabetic. Among them are the Ugaritic, Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, South Arabian, and Ge'ez alphabets. Maltese is the only Semitic language written in the Latin alphabet and the only official Semitic language of the European Union.