- 0 - 521 - 86533 - 3 - The Afroasiatic Languages

Afroasiatic is the fourth largest linguistic phylum in the world, with about 375 living languages spoken by some 300 million speakers (www.ethnologue.org). In the view of the contributors to this volume, this number may well be an overestimation. For the Chadic family alone Ethnologue estimates over 190 languages, while most linguists working in the area estimate the number to be between 140 and 160 languages. The differences boil down to decisions regarding what is a language and what is a dialect. Given the absence of clear-cut criteria for this distinction we leave the question of the actual number of languages open. This book provides the first-ever typological survey of each of the language families belonging to the Afroasiatic phylum as well as a typological outline of the entire phylum. The book is addressed to a general linguistic audience, some of whom may be unfamiliar with Afroasiatic linguistics, as well as to linguists who have worked on Afroasiatic languages and would like information about languages from other branches and about the characteristics of the whole phylum. The approach taken in this book is typological rather than historical, taking for granted the existence of the Afroasiatic family, as confirmed by comparative historical studies. This is because a number of phenomena in contemporary languages can best be explained by the internal structure of the grammatical systems rather than by their origin in an ancestral proto-language. There exist a fair number of studies, chief among them Diakonoff (1988), that take a historical rather than a typological approach to selected issues. We adhere to the common usage in referring to Afroasiatic as a phylum, rather than a family, on the grounds of the remoteness of the relationships among its various branches (Diakonoff 1988). We also take it as given that the phylum is composed of six language families (from west to east), namely Berber, Chadic, Egyptian, Cushitic, Omotic, and Semitic, even though the internal structure of the phylum remains somewhat