Afroasiatic family
af-roh-ay-zhee-AT-ik FAM-uh-lee
ˌæfroʊeɪʒiˈætɪk ˈfæmɪliːListen
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a major language phylum spoken by approximately 400 million people across North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and the Middle East, comprising six branches: Semitic (including Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, and Tigrinya), Berber (Tamazight), Cushitic (Somali, Oromo, Afar), Chadic (Hausa and approximately 150 others), Omotic (Wolaytta, Gamo), and the extinct Ancient Egyptian/Coptic branch; the Semitic branch is attested in written records going back over 4,000 years, making Afroasiatic one of the best-documented language families in history; the shared features of Afroasiatic languages include root-and-pattern morphology in which consonantal roots carry lexical meaning while vowel patterns mark grammatical categories, a feature most elaborated in the Semitic branch
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