Afro-Asiatic

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.

No other language family in the world carries as many living scriptural languages as this one. Hebrew is the language of the Tanakh and of Jewish liturgy, and it was revived as a spoken language in the twentieth century after some seventeen centuries in which it was principally read and prayed rather than spoken. Classical Arabic is the language of the Qur'an and, for the tradition that reads it, the language in which the revelation was given rather than a translatable vehicle for it.

Ge'ez is the liturgical language of Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox Christianity, which preserves in its canon books that survive nowhere else in a complete form. Coptic, the last stage of Egyptian, is the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church and the language of the Nag Hammadi library. Aramaic and its descendant Syriac carry parts of the Hebrew Bible, a large body of Christian literature, and the scriptures of the Mandaeans.

Four of these belong to the Semitic branch, and the fifth, Coptic, is Egyptian. That concentration is the reason a reader working through the religious literature of the Near East keeps meeting the same roots in different scripts. It is not evidence that the traditions borrowed from each other, though many of them did. It is evidence that they were composed by neighbours speaking related languages.