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  2. Evolution of languages - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_languages

    The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...

  3. Origin of language - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language

    The origin of language, its relationship with human evolution, and its consequences have been subjects of study for centuries.Scholars wishing to study the origins of language must draw inferences from evidence such as the fossil record, archaeological evidence, contemporary language diversity, studies of language acquisition, and comparisons between human language and systems of animal ...

  4. Languages of Africa - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Africa

    There are approximately 375 Afroasiatic languages spoken by over 400 million people. The main subfamilies of Afroasiatic are Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Omotic, Egyptian and Semitic. The Afroasiatic Urheimat is uncertain. The family's most extensive branch, the Semitic languages (including Arabic, Amharic and Hebrew among others), is the only ...

  5. Writing systems of Africa - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_systems_of_Africa

    Egyptian hieroglyphs. The writing systems of Africa refer to the current and historical practice of writing systems on the African continent, both indigenous and those introduced. In many African societies, history generally used to be recorded orally despite most societies having developed a writing script, leading to them being termed "oral ...

  6. The Languages of Africa - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Languages_of_Africa

    The Languages of Africa. The Languages of Africa is a 1963 book of essays by the linguist Joseph Greenberg, in which the author sets forth a genetic classification of African languages that, with some changes, continues to be the most commonly used one today. It is an expanded and extensively revised version of his 1955 work Studies in African ...

  7. Proto-Afroasiatic homeland - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Afroasiatic_homeland

    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 Africa ...

  8. Proto-Human language - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Human_language

    The Proto-Human language, also known as Proto-Sapiens or Proto-World, is the hypothetical direct genetic predecessor of all human languages. [1] The concept is speculative and not amenable to analysis in historical linguistics. It presupposes a monogenetic origin of language, i.e. the derivation of all natural languages from a single origin ...

  9. Nilo-Saharan languages - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nilo-Saharan_languages

    The Nilo-Saharan languages are a proposed family of around 210 African languages [1] spoken by somewhere around 70 million speakers, [1] mainly in the upper parts of the Chari and Nile rivers, including historic Nubia, north of where the two tributaries of the Nile meet. The languages extend through 17 nations in the northern half of Africa ...