Hamito-Semitic languages , family of languages spoken by more than 200 million people in N Africa; much of the Sahara; parts of E, central, and W Africa; and W Asia (especially the Arabian peninsula, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel). Since four of the Hamito-Semitic tongues, Arabic, Hebrew, Coptic, and Syriac, are also respectively the languages of Islam, Judaism, and two sects of the Christian faith, the language family reaches many millions in addition to its native speakers.
Traditionally, the Hamito-Semitic language family is said to have two subfamilies: Semitic and Hamitic. Although some scholars regard Hamitic and Semitic as two distinct language families, they possess a number of grammatical similarities and have a larger common vocabulary than borrowing would account for. The most satisfactory explanation is that the Hamitic and Semitic groups, despite their divergences, are subfamilies of a single Hamito-Semitic linguistic family, as evidenced by their marked grammatical, lexical, and phonological resemblances.
The languages of the Hamito-Semitic family are thought to have first been spoken along the shores of the Red Sea. Another theory holds that the Hamito-Semitic, or Afroasiatic, language family came into being in Africa, for only in Africa are all its members found, aside from some Semitic languages encountered in W Asia. The existence of the Semitic languages in W Asia is explained by assuming that the Semites of Africa migrated from E Africa to W Asia in very ancient times. At a later date, some Semites returned from Arabia to Africa.
