Family of Afro-Asiatic languages spoken by more than 200 million people in northern Africa and South Asia. No other language family has been attested in writing over a greater time span—from the late 3rd millennium BCE to the present. Both traditional and some recent classifications divide the family into an eastern and western group. Until recently the sole known East Semitic language was Akkadian; now some scholars add Eblaite, the language of a cuneiform archive found at the ancient city of Ebla, with documents dating from circa 2300 to 2250 BCE. West Semitic contains as one major subgroup Northwest Semitic, which includes Ugaritic, known from alphabetic cuneiform texts of circa 1400–1200 BCE; the closely related Canaanite languages (including Moabite, Phoenician, and Ancient Hebrew); and Aramaic. Further subgrouping is controversial; traditionally, Arabic was placed in a distinct South Semitic subgroup of West Semitic, though a more recent classification puts it together with Northwest Semitic. The South Semitic languages include Epigraphic South Arabian; Modern South Arabian (or Modern South Arabic), a group of six languages spoken in eastern Yemen, southwestern Oman, and the island of Socotra; and Ethiopic.

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Family of about 250 languages spoken in North Africa, parts of sub-Saharan African, and the Middle East. It includes such languages as Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, and Hausa. The total number of speakers is estimated to be more than 250 million. The major branches of Afro-Asiatic are Semitic, Berber, Egyptian, Cushitic, Omotic, and Chadic. Berber languages are spoken by perhaps 15 million people in enclaves scattered across North Africa from Morocco to northwestern Egypt and in parts of the western Sahara. Cushitic consists of some 30 languages spoken by more than 30 million people in northeastern Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti, Kenya, and a few areas of northeastern Tanzania. Omotic, formerly classified as part of Cushitic, is a cluster of perhaps more than 30 languages spoken by 2–3 million people, most of whom live near the Omo River in southwestern Ethiopia. Chadic comprises about 140 languages (most of which are poorly known to linguists), spoken in northern Nigeria, southern Niger, southern Chad, and northern Cameroon; except for Hausa, it is likely that no individual Chadic language has more than half a million speakers.

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