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All Major Afroasiatic Languages (with a map)

Can you name all the Afroasiatic languages/dialects on the map below? Only language with more than 500,000 people are included.
All L1 speaker data taken from each language's Wikipedia page, some figures may be disputable
Not including the controversial Omotic language family.
Quiz by Jiaozira
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Last updated: January 17, 2022
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First submittedJanuary 17, 2022
Times taken6,702
Average score35.7%
Rating4.91
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Semitic
 
L1
Language
 
348 m
Arabic
 
>
Egypto-Sudanic Arabic
132 m
>
Maghrebi Arabic
95 m
>
Peninsular Arabic
42 m
>
Mesopotamian Arabic
41 m
>
Levantine Arabic
38 m
32 m
Amharic
 
9.8 m
Tigrinya
 
5.0 m
Hebrew
 
1.0 m
Tigre
 
587 k
Suret
 
520 k
Maltese
 
 
 
 
 
 
Chadic
 
L1
Language
 
60 m
Hausa
 
 
 
 
 
 
Cushitic
 
L1
Language
 
37 m
Oromo
 
21 m
Somali
 
3.0 m
Sidama
 
1.9 m
Afar
 
1.3 m
Hadiyya
 
1.1 m
Beja
 
980 k
Gedeo
 
740 k
Kambaata
 
 
 
 
 
 
Berber
 
L1
Language
 
4.3 m
Shilha
 
3.0 m
Kabyle
 
2.4 m
Central Atlas Tamazight
 
2.1 m
Tarifit
 
2.1 m
Shawiya
 
801 k
Tawellemmet
 
500 k
Tamasheq
 
 
 
 
A Brief Comparison
EN
 
Tomorrow, I will go see the pretty market.
FR
 
Demain, j'irai voir le marché joli.
 
 
 
 
 
 
AR
 
.غدا ، سأذهب لأرى السوق الجميل
ghadan, sa2adhhab li2araa as-suwq al-jamila.
AR-EG
bokra, haroh 2ashuf as-su2 al-gamil.
AR-MA
ghedda, mashi nshouf es-suq ez-zine.
AR-LE
bukra, ana raye7a shuf as-su2 el-helo.
 
 
 
AM
 
ነገ, ቆንጆውን ገበያ ለማየት እሄዳለሁ።
nege, k'onijowini gebeya lemayeti ihēdalehu።
HE
 
.מחר, אני אלך לראות השוק היפה.
makhar, 'ana halakh lire'ut a-shuq a-yafeh.
MT
 
Għada, sa mmur nara is-suq is-sabiħ.
 
 
 
HA
 
Gobe, zan je ganinkyakkyawar.kasuwa.
 
 
 
SO
 
Berri, waxaan aadi doonaa si aan u arko
suuqa quruxda badan.
 
 
 
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20 Comments
Jiaozira
+5
Level 71
Jan 17, 2022
Finally, the next entry in the series!

This one is kind of similar to another quiz I made on this facinating family, although the older quiz has some glaring errors. I would have included more languages with less than 500k L1 speakers, however the list becomes hard to make quickly due to conflicting figures.

I hope my translations are relatively okay. They are very general, and unfortunately I do not provide specifics on how certain words are inflicted and so on and so forth. Also Somali was mind-blowing, so I am skeptical of my colour-coding. I got to include some 'dialects' this time, although the concept of 'dialects' is more of a political thing than a linguistic one, and I only make the distinction for quizzes.

A lot of the space on the map in uninhabited. Therefore, some language-areas may follow national (straight-line) borders or appear larger in area than they actually are.

Jiaozira
+6
Level 71
Jan 17, 2022
Arabic is an interesting case example. The literary language is called Modern Standard Arabic, however no one speaks it as a native language and it is used only in formal situations. Meanwhile, Arabic speakers use their own 'dialects' (really their own languages) which descend from Classical Arabic. Each dialect cluster has influences from local languages prior to the spread of Arabic, so Maghrebi Arabic has Berber/Tamazight influence, Egyptian has Coptic (the descendent of the Ancient Egyptian tongue) influence, Mesopotamian as Assyrian influence, etc. Speakers can often understand each other within their dialect cluster, and have a harder time understanding others. MSA is a uniting factor, and plays a similar role to that of Latin in Medieval Europe.

I accept each dialect cluster as an answer, although the names of specific languages/dialects are type-ins. Maybe one day I'll do a quiz solely on the varieties of Arabic :)

JWatson24
+3
Level 71
Jan 17, 2022
Jiaozira strikes again! Nice seeing a new language quiz from you in such a long time. I've known that Arabic and Hebrew are closely related, but I never realized the languages of Ethiopia (Amharic, Tigrinya, etc.) were as well! I also didn't realize Hausa and Somali were also part of this language family.
Jiaozira
+3
Level 71
Jan 17, 2022
Thank you! It's been a long time coming. I tend to forget too that Amharic and Tigrinya are not just Afroasiatic but Semitic. It is an amazing and also historical language family, with many archaic languages like Phoenician, Aramaic, Ancient Egyptian and Ge'ez. I enjoyed researching for the quiz, I wish statistics were a little easier to come by for some of the Ethiopian languages (then maybe I'd have added more!)
thread
+2
Level 66
Sep 22, 2022
It's also amazing how they've had two of the most interesting unifying language projects or situations. One is the revival of Hebrew to unite Jews when Israel was founded and the other is the usage of Modern Standard Arabic as well as dialects to unite Arabs while keeping regional identities as well. This could be used in many diverse countries as well but a lot of them just choose the most spoken language and suppress smaller ones, while the Arab World isn't even a country and they found a solution.
Jiaozira
+1
Level 71
Sep 22, 2022
I can't speak much for Hebrew but the situation with Arabic is very interesting, and these countries are very lucky to share in such a rich literary tradition while also having unique dialects with cultural differences. Egyptian Arabic has a very different flavour from Levantine Arabic for example.

It is an interesting thought, whether this could have happened in Latin Europe or North India for example. It's not a perfect model in the Arab countries either, as many Arabs today struggle with MSA (which is just called FusHa in the Arab World).

I guess this is why so many countries (especially diverse ones) go with English as the lingua franca. It is seen as a politcally neutral choice.

thread
+4
Level 66
Jan 17, 2022
Incredible.
Jiaozira
+2
Level 71
Jan 17, 2022
Thank you TheNatureThread!
JohnnyYeet
+2
Level 59
Mar 1, 2022
Amazing quiz! A great addition to one of my favorite quiz series' on JetPunk. Nominated!
Jiaozira
+1
Level 71
Mar 1, 2022
Thank you veru much! :D
N1v3hr3
+2
Level 51
Mar 4, 2022
Awesome seeing another entry! One note is that the Hebrew translation is wrong, it's supposed to be

".מחר, אני אלך לראות את השוק היפה" Hebrew is written right-to-left so there's no dot before מחר

And after the verb there's supposed to be "את', which signifies that the object the verb is referring to is unique. "לראות את השוק" is to "See the Market", "לראות שוק" is to "See a Market".

"לראות השוק" doesn't make grammatical sense.

Jiaozira
+1
Level 71
Mar 4, 2022
Thank you for playing!

I will fix the Hebrew. It was a minor nightmare getting JetPunk text boxes to cooperate with the writing direction, I didn't notice the dot had swapped places haha.

Could you please give me a Romanisation of the (correct) phrase, if possible? I did my best above by using a Hebrew dictionary but I am not super confident with my work.

I appreciate the translation. I had to use Google Translate for each language except for Arabic so there will be mistakes.. :(

LAlphy
+2
Level 63
May 13, 2022
Why are there numbers in the romanizations
thread
+4
Level 66
May 13, 2022
Because Arabic has too many sounds for Latin.
Jiaozira
+1
Level 71
May 14, 2022
The numbers are a convention which evolved around the birth of the internet. Originally, Arabic script was not supported on these platforms and so Arabic speakers had to use numbers and capitalisations to replace the many sounds which the Latin Alphabet cannot easily show.

In Arabic there are a number of fricative sounds and pharyngealised sounds (which sound like a hard T, D, S, Z sound). Therefore 3, 7 and 5 (especially in Egypt) are commonly used to replace these sounds, and capital letters show the pharyngealised (hard) sounds.

This way of writing is called Arabic chat alphabet and it has become quite standardised. However, it is still informal and so I didn't use it for the Modern Standard Arabic (elegant) Romanisation.

Odi
+2
Level 43
Jul 3, 2022
i think it's wrong to have all peninsular arabic dialects under one label
Jiaozira
+2
Level 71
Jul 5, 2022
Some of the Arabic groupings should be broken down further, I agree with you. I will change this soon.
sergeantmalice
+1
Level 56
Aug 6, 2022
Don't let Sudanese people catch you labeling their dialect with Egyptian
babie90s
+1
Level 57
Jun 26, 2023
Really nice quiz! one thing that could be fixed is for the french translation "joli" is actually before "marché" like engllish does, in french adjectives can be both placed before and after the noun but not in all cases i couldnt explain myself
Wistful
+1
Level 72
May 31, 2024
The transparency for Socotra is a little off.
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