Search results for "Afroasiatic languages"

Ethiopian Semitic Languages

2006

The article presents an overview of the Ethiopian Semitic (ES) languages spoken in the Horn of Africa. Among the presently spoken Semitic languages, ES languages comprise more than 80% and are divided into a northern and a southern group. Although this division is basically regional, there is a strong morpho-syntactic support for this classification. ES languages show a higher complexity in the use of concatenative and nonconcatentative morphemes for various grammatical categories. This rich morphological behavior, the SOV order, and other peculiar morphophonemic features are assumed to be the result of language contact, but sufficient data for this claim are still lacking.