Afroasiatic Urheimat

The term Afroasiatic Urheimat refers to the place where Proto-Afroasiatic speakers lived in a single linguistic community, or complex of communities, before this original language dispersed geographically and divided into distinct languages. Afroasiatic languages are spoken today in many parts of Africa and western Asia. (Urheimat means "original homeland" in German.)

There is no agreement on when and where this Urheimat existed, though the language is generally believed to have originated somewhere in or near the region stretching from the Levant to Kenya, and from the Eastern Sahara to the Red Sea, and most commonly thought to have been in the area of Ethiopia and Sudan.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}

Theories

Notable hypotheses include the following:

1. The Horn of Africa, particularly the area of Ethiopia and Eritrea, has been proposed by many linguists because it includes the majority of the diversity of the Afroasiatic language family and has very diverse groups in close geographic proximity, often considered a telltale sign for a linguistic geographic origin. Within this region there are several variants:
   • Christopher Ehret has proposed the western Red Sea coast from Eritrea to southeastern Egypt. While Ehret disputes Militarev's proposal that Proto-Afroasiatic shows signs of a common farming lexicon, he suggests that early Afroasiatic languages were involved in the even earlier development of intensive food collection in the areas of Ethiopia and Sudan. In other words, he proposes an even older age for Afroasiatic than Militarev, at least 15,000 years old and possibly older, and believes farming lexicon can only be reconstructed for branches of Afroasiatic.^[6][7][8][9]

   In the next phase, Ehret proposed an initial split between northern, southern and Omotic. The northern group includes Semitic, Egyptian and Berber (agreeing with others such as Diakonoff). More controversially, he proposed that Chadic stems from Berber (some other authors group it with southern Afroasiatic languages such as Cushitic ones).

   • Roger Blench has proposed Southwestern Ethiopia, in or around the Omo Valley. Compared to Militarev and Ehret he proposed a relatively young time-depth of approximately 7,500 years. Like Ehret he accepts that Omotic is Afroasiatic and sees the split of northern languages and Omotic as an important early development, but he did not group Egyptian or Chadic with any of these.
   • Martin Bernal originally proposed the area around the Kenya-Ethiopia border, before moving his focus south to the Great Rift Valley.^[3]
2. The Eastern Sahara. Igor Diakonoff proposed this region, specifically the southern fringe of the Sahara.^[3][4]
3. Sudan. Lionel Bender proposed the area near Khartoum, at the confluence of the Blue Nile and White Nile.^[3][4] The details of his theory are widely cited but controversial, and involves the proposal that Semitic originated in Ethiopia and crossed to Asia directly from there over the Red Sea.

   A more typical proposal is that Semitic is an offshoot of a northern family of Afroasiatic languages, including Berber, and possibly Egyptian. It then entered the Levant and was possibly spread by what Juris Zarins calls the Syro-Arabian nomadic pastoralism complex,^[10] spreading south along the shores of the Red Sea and northeast around the edge of the "Fertile Crescent". It is thought that Semitic speakers then crossed from South Arabia back into Eritrea.^[11]

   In contrast, Bender proposed on linguistic grounds that Cushitic (found in the Horn of Africa) shares important innovations with Semitic and Berber, and that these three split off early from the others, while still near the homeland of all Afroasiatic.

4. The Levant. Supporters of a non-African origin for Afroasiatic are particularly common among those with a background in Semitic or Egyptological studies,^[1] or amongst archaeological proponents of the "farming/language dispersal hypothesis" according to which major language groups dispersed with early farming technology in the Neolithic.^[12][13] The leading linguistic proponent of this idea in recent times is Alexander Militarev. Arguments for and against this position depend upon the contested proposal that farming-related words can be reconstructed in Proto-Afroasiatic, with farming technology being thought to have spread from the Levant into Africa.

   Militarev, who linked proto-Afroasiatic to the Levantine Natufian culture, that preceded the spread of farming technology, believes the language family to be about 10,000 years old. He wrote (Militarev 2002, p. 135) that the “Proto-Afrasian language, on the verge of a split into daughter languages”, meaning, in his scenario, into “Cushitic, Omotic, Egyptian, Semitic and Chadic-Berber”, “should be roughly dated to the ninth millennium BC”.

5. The Great Rift Valley. More controversially, Martin Bernal came to argue for this Urheimat further south based upon perceived connections between Afroasiatic and Khoisan languages, chiefly the presence of sex-based grammatical gender in contrast to other African languages. This appeared in his controversial work Black Athena, and has not been extensively cited as a mainstream theory.^[3]

Population genetics

Using genetics to make a linguistic argument about a language urheimat and linguistic prehistory is still controversial among linguists.^[16]

The migration of Afroasiatic languages from their original homeland is often thought to have also involved the movements of significant numbers of people. Therefore, attempts have been made to associate Afroasiatic language groups with genetic markers.

The most commonly cited genetic marker in recent decades has been the Y chromosome, which is passed from father to son along paternal lines in un-mixed form, and therefore gives a relatively clear definition of one human line of descent from common ancestors.

Several branches of humanity's Y DNA family tree have been proposed as having an association with the spread of Afroasiatic languages.

1. Haplogroup E1b1b is thought to have originated in East Africa. In general, Afroasiatic speaking populations have relatively high frequencies of this haplogroup, with the notable exception of Chadic speaking populations. Christopher Ehret and Shomarka Keita have suggested that the geography of the E1b1b lineage coincides with the distribution of Afroasiatic languages.^[17]

2. Haplogroup J1c3 (Y-DNA), formally known as "J1e", is actually a more common paternal lineage than E1b1b in most Semitic speaking populations, but this is associated with Middle Eastern origins and has apparently been spread from there after the original dispersion of Afroasiatic.^[18]

3. Haplogroup R1b1a (R-V88), and specifically its sub-clade R-V69, has a very strong relationship with Chadic speaking populations, who unlike other Afroasiatic speakers have low frequencies of Haplogroup E1b1b. This was announced in 2010 by Cruciani et al.^[21] The majority of R-V88 was found in northern and central Africa, in Chadic speaking populations. It is less common in neighbouring populations. The authors also found evidence of high concentration in Western Egypt and evidence that the closest related types of R1b are found in the Middle East, and to a lesser extent southern Europe. They proposed that an Eastern Saharan origin for Chadic R1b would agree with linguistic theories such as those of Christopher Ehret, that Chadic and Berber form a related group within Afroasiatic, which originated in the area of the Sahara.^[21]

In contrast to the evidence from paternally inherited Y DNA, a recent study has shown that a branch of mitochondrial haplogroup L3 links the maternal ancestry of Chadic speakers from the Sahel with Cushitic speakers from East Africa.^[22]

Other mitochondrial lineages that are associated with Afroasiatic include mitochondrial haplogroups M1 and haplogroup U6. Gonzalez et al. 2007 suggest that Afroasiatic speakers may have dispersed from East Africa carrying the subclades M1a and U6a1.^[23]

Nostratic hypothesis

The Nostratic language family is a proposed macrofamily grouping together a number of language families including Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, and more controversially Afroasiatic. Following Pedersen, Illich-Svitych, and Dolgopolsky, most advocates of the theory have included Afroasiatic in Nostratic, though criticisms by Joseph Greenberg and others from the late 1980s onward suggested a reassessment of this position.

Ilya Yabonovich and other linguists, in examining the differences between the various members of the Afroasiatic family have realised that all of the old etymologies for this group were inherently semitocentric. The differences between Chadic, Omotic, Cushitic and Semitic, were wider than those seen between any members of the Indo-European family and as wide as some of the differences seen within and between separate language families, for example, Indo-European and Altaic. Certainly the exclusion of Afroasiatic from the controversial Nostratic family has simplified matters of phonemics, not having to include the complex patterns seen in Afroasiatic languages.

Allan Bomhard (1994) retains Afroasiatic within Nostratic, despite his admission that Proto–Afroasiatic is very different from the other members of the proposed linguistic Nostratic superfamily.^[24] As a result he suggests it was probably the first language to have split from the Nostratic linguistic superfamily. Recently, however, a consensus has been emerging among proponents of the Nostratic hypothesis. Greenberg in fact basically agreed with the Nostratic concept, though he stressed a deep internal division between its northern 'tier' (his Eurasiatic) and a southern 'tier' (principally Afroasiatic and Dravidian). The American Nostraticist Allan Bomhard considers Eurasiatic a branch of Nostratic alongside other branches: Afroasiatic, Elamo-Dravidian, and Kartvelian. Similarly, Georgiy Starostin (2002) arrives at a tripartite overall grouping: he considers Afroasiatic, Nostratic and Elamite to be roughly equidistant and more closely related to each other than to anything else.^[25] Sergei Starostin's school has now re-included Afroasiatic in a broadly defined Nostratic, while reserving the term Eurasiatic to designate the narrower subgrouping which comprises the rest of the macrofamily. Recent proposals thus differ mainly on the precise placement of Dravidian and Kartvelian.

See also

• African languages
• Afroasiatic
• Languages of Asia
• Nostratic languages
• Proto-Afroasiatic
• Proto-Indo-European Urheimat hypotheses

References

Bibliography

• Barnett, William and John Hoopes (editors). 1995. The Emergence of Pottery. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. ISBN 1-56098-517-8
• Bender, Lionel et al. 2003. Selected Comparative-Historical Afro-Asiatic Studies in Memory of Igor M. Diakonoff. LINCOM.
• Bomhard, Alan R. 1996. Indo-European and the Nostratic Hypothesis. Signum.
• Diakonoff, Igor M. (1996). "Some reflections on the Afrasian linguistic macrofamily". Journal of Near Eastern Studies 55: 293. 
• Diakonoff, Igor M. (1998). "The earliest Semitic society: Linguistic data". Journal of Semitic Studies 43: 209. 
• Dimmendaal, Gerrit, and Erhard Voeltz. 2007. "Africa". In Christopher Moseley, ed., Encyclopedia of the world's endangered languages.
• Ehret, Christopher. 1997. Abstract of "The lessons of deep-time historical-comparative reconstruction in Afroasiatic: reflections on Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic: Vowels, Tone, Consonants, and Vocabulary (U.C. Press, 1995)", paper delivered at the Twenty-fifth Annual Meeting of the North American Conference on Afro-Asiatic Linguistics, held in Miami, Florida on March 21–23, 1997.
• Finnegan, Ruth H. 1970. "Afro-Asiatic languages West Africa". Oral Literature in Africa, pg 558.
• Fleming, Harold C. 2006. Ongota: A Decisive Language in African Prehistory. Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz.
• Greenberg, Joseph H. (1950). "Studies in African linguistic classification: IV. Hamito-Semitic". Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 6 (1): 47–63. JSTOR 3628690. 
• Greenberg, Joseph H. 1955. Studies in African Linguistic Classification. New Haven: Compass Publishing Company. (Photo-offset reprint of the SJA articles with minor corrections.)
• Greenberg, Joseph H. 1963. The Languages of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University. (Heavily revised version of Greenberg 1955.)
• Greenberg, Joseph H. 1966. The Languages of Africa (2nd ed. with additions and corrections). Bloomington: Indiana University.
• Greenberg, Joseph H. 1981. "African linguistic classification." General History of Africa, Volume 1: Methodology and African Prehistory, edited by Joseph Ki-Zerbo, 292–308. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• Greenberg, Joseph H. 2000–2002. Indo-European and Its Closest Relatives: The Eurasiatic Language Family, Volume 1: Grammar, Volume 2: Lexicon. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Hayward, R. J. 1995. "The challenge of Omotic: an inaugural lecture delivered on 17 February 1994". London: School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
• Heine, Bernd and Derek Nurse. 2000. African Languages, Chapter 4. Cambridge University Press.
• Hodge, Carleton T. (editor). 1971. Afroasiatic: A Survey. The Hague - Paris: Mouton.
• Hodge, Carleton T. 1991. "Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic." In Sydney M. Lamb and E. Douglas Mitchell (editors), Sprung from Some Common Source: Investigations into the Prehistory of Languages, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 141–165.
• Huehnergard, John. 2004. "Afro-Asiatic." In R.D. Woodard (editor), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World’s Ancient Languages, Cambridge - New York, 2004, 138–159.
• Militarev, Alexander. "Towards the genetic affiliation of Ongota, a nearly-extinct language of Ethiopia," 60 pp. In Orientalia et Classica: Papers of the Institute of Oriental and Classical Studies, Issue 5. Мoscow. (Forthcoming.)
• Newman, Paul. 1980. The Classification of Chadic within Afroasiatic. Leiden: Universitaire Pers Leiden.
• Ruhlen, Merritt. 1991. A Guide to the World's Languages. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.
• Sands, Bonny (2009). "Africa's Linguistic Diversity". Language and Linguistics Compass 3 (2): 559–580. doi:10.1111/j.1749-818x.2008.00124.x. 
• Theil, R. 2006. Is Omotic Afro-Asiatic? Proceedings from the David Dwyer retirement symposium, Michigan State University, East Lansing, 21 October 2006.

External links

• Map of Afro-Asiatic languages from Roger Blench's website
• Family tree of Afro-Asiatic at Ethnologue.com
• Family trees of Afro-Asiatic at the LINGUIST List.
• Afro-Asiatic and Semitic genealogical trees, presented by Alexander Militarev at his talk "Genealogical classification of Afro-Asiatic languages according to the latest data" at the conference on the 70th anniversary of V.M. Illich-Svitych, Moscow, 2004; short annotations of the talks given there (Russian)
• A comparison of Orel-Stolbova's and Ehret's Afro-Asiatic reconstructions
• NACAL The North American Conference on Afroasiatic Linguistics.