Proto-Afroasiatic homeland
hypothetical linguistic homeland of the Proto-Afroasiatic language
The Proto-Afroasiatic homeland is the hypothetical place where speakers of the Proto-Afroasiatic language lived in a single linguistic community, or complex of communities, before this original language dispersed geographically and divided into separate distinct languages. Afroasiatic languages are today mostly distributed in parts of Western Asia and North Africa.
The contemporary Afroasiatic languages are spoken in West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, parts of the Sahara and Sahel, and Malta in Europe. The various hypotheses for the Afroasiatic homeland are distributed throughout this territory; that is, it is generally assumed that Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken in some region where Afroasiatic languages are still spoken today, although this is not unanimous. However, there is disagreement as to which part of the contemporary Afroasiatic speaking areas corresponds with the original homeland. The majority of scholars today contend that Afroasiatic languages arose somewhere in Northeast Africa or Western Asia.
Date of Proto-Afroasiatic
There is no consensus as to when Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken. The absolute latest date for when Proto-Afroasiatic could have been extant is c. 4000 BC, after which Egyptian and the Semitic languages are firmly attested. However, in all likelihood these languages began to diverge well before this hard boundary. The estimations offered by scholars as to when Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken vary widely, ranging from 18,000 BC to 8,000 BC. According to Igor M. Diakonoff (1988: 33n), Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken c.
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