AFRO-ASIATIC

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 Dictionary entry overview: What does Afro-Asiatic mean? 

• AFRO-ASIATIC (noun)
  The noun AFRO-ASIATIC has 1 sense:

1. a large family of related languages spoken both in Asia and Africa

  Familiarity information: AFRO-ASIATIC used as a noun is very rare.

 Dictionary entry details 

• AFRO-ASIATIC (noun)

Sense 1

Meaning:

A large family of related languages spoken both in Asia and Africa

Classified under:

Nouns denoting communicative processes and contents

Synonyms:

Afrasian; Afrasian language; Afro-Asiatic; Afroasiatic; Afroasiatic language; Hamito-Semitic

Hypernyms ("Afro-Asiatic" is a kind of...):

natural language; tongue (a human written or spoken language used by a community; opposed to e.g. a computer language)

Hyponyms (each of the following is a kind of "Afro-Asiatic"):

Chad; Chadic; Chadic language (a family of Afroasiatic tonal languages (mostly two tones) spoken in the regions west and south of Lake Chad in north central Africa)

Semitic (a major branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family)

Hamitic; Hamitic language (a group of languages in northern Africa related to Semitic)

Egyptian (the ancient and now extinct language of Egypt under the Pharaohs; written records date back to 3000 BC)

Berber (a cluster of related dialects that were once the major language of northern Africa west of Egypt; now spoken mostly in Morocco)

Cushitic (a group of languages spoken in Ethiopia and Somalia and northwestern Kenya and adjacent regions)

Omotic (a group of related languages spoken in a valley of southern Ethiopia; closely related to Cushitic languages)