Afro-Asiatic Languages, phylum or super-family (formerly known erroneously as Hamito-Semitic) that contains almost 400 languages, spoken by more than 200 million speakers across the northern third of Africa and south-west Asia. There are six major families—Ancient Egyptian (extinct), Semitic, Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, and Omotic, plus one unclassified branch. Ancient Egyptian survived (as Coptic) until the 14th century AD. Important Semitic languages include the many regional varieties of Arabic, spoken by over 100 million speakers within (North) Africa itself in addition to many more millions in the Middle East and also as a second language; Hebrew, 5 million speakers (including second language speakers) in Israel and a few other countries; and the Ethio-Semitic languages Amharic (21 million speakers in Ethiopia and other countries), and Tigrigna (4.5 million in Ethiopia and Eritrea). Amharic and Tigrigna are written in the ancient Ethiopic script (Ge'ez). Prominent Semitic languages that are now extinct include Akkadian and Phoenician (varieties of Aramaic still survive).

Berber languages, for example Tamazight (3.15 million), are spoken mainly in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, in addition to scattered communities in the south-western Sahara, and Berber-speakers colonized the Canary Islands. Some Berber languages are written in the Arabic script. Chadic languages are spoken to the east, south, and west of Lake Chad in West Africa. The most important is Hausa, spoken by upwards of 39 million people mainly in northern Nigeria and southern Niger (the largest number of any sub-Saharan African language), and also widely used as a lingua franca. Hausa was first written using a system (ajami) based on the Arabic script. Some Chadic languages have fewer than a thousand speakers. The Cushitic family includes languages spoken in East Africa and the Horn of Africa, including all varieties of Oromo (17 million people in Ethiopia and Kenya), and Somali (over 12.6 million in Somalia, Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Kenya). Omotic languages, for example Wolaytta (1 to 2 million), are spoken in western Ethiopia.

Afro-asiatic languages display complex morphology, including affixation, reduplication, and adjustments in tone and vowel length. Distinctive features include shared pronominal paradigms and common patterns indicating masculine/feminine/plural demonstratives; agential, instrumental, and locative nouns, noun plurals, and feminine gender. A subject-verb-object basic word order is common in the Chadic family, and subject-object-verb order is common in Ethio-Semitic, Cushitic, and Omotic languages.

Selected statistical data from Ethnologue: Languages of the World, SIL International.