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Afroasiatic (Afro-Asiatic), also known as Afrasian and traditionally as Hamito-Semitic (Chamito-Semitic),〔Daniel Don Nanjira, ''(African Foreign Policy and Diplomacy: From Antiquity to the 21st Century )'', (ABC-CLIO: 2010).〕 is a large language family of several hundred related languages and dialects. It comprises about 300 or so living languages and dialects, according to the 2009 Ethnologue estimate.〔(Ethnologue family tree for Afroasiatic languages )〕 It includes languages spoken predominantly in the Middle East, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahel. Afroasiatic languages have 350+ million native speakers, the fourth largest number of any language family.〔(Summary by language family )〕 It has six branches: Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Omotic and Semitic. The most widely spoken Afroasiatic language is Arabic (including literary Arabic and the spoken colloquial varieties), which has around 200 to 230 million native speakers concentrated primarily in the Middle East and in parts of North Africa.〔(Languages of the World )〕 Tamazight and other Berber varieties are spoken in Morocco, Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, northern Mali, and northern Niger by about 25 to 35 million people. Other widely spoken Afroasiatic languages include: * Hausa, the dominant language of northern Nigeria and southern Niger, spoken as a first language by 25 million people and used as a ''lingua franca'' by another 20 million across West Africa and the Sahel〔(Ethnologue - Hausa )〕 * Oromo of Ethiopia and Kenya, with about 33 million speakers total * Amharic of Ethiopia, with over 25 million native speakers in addition to millions of other Ethiopians speaking it as a second language * Somali, spoken by 15.5 million people in Greater Somalia * Modern Hebrew, spoken by around seven million people worldwide * Modern Aramaic, spoken by about 550,000 people worldwide.〔Nordhoff, Sebastian; Hammarström, Harald; Forkel, Robert; Haspelmath, Martin, eds. (2013). "Northeastern Neo-Aramaic". Glottolog 2.2. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.〕 This is not just one language — It includes a number of subdivisions, with Assyrian Neo-Aramaic being the most spoken variety (232,300).〔Beyer, Klaus; John F. Healey (trans.) (1986). The Aramaic Language: its distribution and subdivisions. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. p. 44. ISBN 3-525-53573-2.〕 In addition to languages spoken today, Afroasiatic includes several important ancient languages, such as Ancient Egyptian, Akkadian, Biblical Hebrew, and Old Aramaic. ==Etymology== The Afroasiatic language family was originally referred to as "Hamito-Semitic", a term introduced in the 1860s by the German scholar Karl Richard Lepsius. The name was later popularized by Friedrich Müller in his ''Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft'' (Vienna 1876-88).〔Friedrich Müller (1884) (''Grundriss der Sprachwissenschaft'' ), Vol. 3, Alfred Hölder, Vienna〕 The term "Afroasiatic" (often now spelled as "Afro-Asiatic") was later coined by Maurice Delafosse (1914). However, it did not come into general use until Joseph Greenberg (1950) formally proposed its adoption. In doing so, Greenberg sought to emphasize the fact that Afroasiatic was represented transcontinentally, in both Africa and Asia.〔 Individual scholars have also called the family "Erythraean" (Tucker 1966) and "Lisramic" (Hodge 1972). In lieu of "Hamito-Semitic", the Russian linguist Igor Diakonoff later suggested the term "Afrasian", meaning "half African, half Asiatic", in reference to the geographic distribution of the family's constituent languages.〔 The term "Hamito-Semitic" remains in use in the academic traditions of some European countries. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Afroasiatic languages」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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