- language family of ~500+ million speakers across North Africa, Horn of Africa, and the Middle East
- branches: Semitic (Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, Tigrinya), Berber (Tamazight), Chadic (Hausa), Cushitic (Oromo, Somali), Egyptian (extinct, survived as Coptic), Omotic
- Arabic: ~400 million speakers, liturgical language of Islam, one of the six UN official languages
- Hebrew: revived from liturgical to spoken language in the 19th-20th century
- Semitic root system: three-consonant roots carry core meaning, vowel patterns inflect grammar
- Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics and Akkadian cuneiform are the oldest attested writing systems, both Afroasiatic
- the Phoenician alphabet, ancestor of Greek and Latin scripts, was Semitic
- deep time depth: proto-Afroasiatic estimated at ~12,000-18,000 years ago, contemporary with the Neolithic revolution