Arabic, if counted as a single language, is by far the most widely spoken within the family, with around 300 million native speakers concentrated primarily in the Middle East and North Africa.

[9] While systematic sound laws have not yet been established to explain the relationships between the various branches of Afroasiatic, the languages share a number of common features.

In addition, Joseph Greenberg has argued that Hamitic possesses racial connotations, and that "Hamito-Semitic" overstates the centrality of the Semitic languages within the family.

[14] Due to concerns that "Afroasiatic" could imply the inclusion of all languages spoken across Africa and Asia, the name "Afrasian" (Russian: afrazijskije) was proposed by Igor Diakonoff in 1980.

[23][14] The names Lisramic—based on the Afroasiastic root *lis- ("tongue") and the Egyptian word rmṯ ("person")—and Erythraean—referring to the core area around which the languages are spoken, the Red Sea—have also been proposed.

[6] Due to the presumed distance of relationship between the various branches, many scholars prefer to refer to Afroasiatic as a "linguistic phylum" rather than a "language family".

[29] In the past, Berber languages were spoken throughout North Africa except in Egypt;[30] since the 7th century CE, however, they have been heavily affected by Arabic and have been replaced by it in many places.

[33] The first is the Numidian language, represented by over a thousand short inscriptions in the Libyco-Berber alphabet, found throughout North Africa and dating from the 2nd century BCE onward.

[37] Hausa is the largest Chadic language by native speakers, and is spoken by a large number of people as a lingua franca in Northern Nigeria.

[45] Egyptian is first attested in writing around 3000 BCE and finally went extinct around 1300 CE, making it the language with the longest written history in the world.

[60] Whereas Marcel Cohen (1947) claimed he saw no evidence for internal subgroupings, numerous other scholars have made proposals,[65] with Carsten Peust counting 27 as of 2012.

[60] The "Hamitic theory" would serve as the basis for Carl Meinhof's highly influential classification of African languages in his 1912 book Die Sprache der Hamiten.

[82] On the other hand, the classification also relied on non-linguistic anthropological and culturally contingent features, such as skin color, hair type, and lifestyle.

[60] However, Meinhof's "Hamitic" classification remained prevalent throughout the early 20th century until it was definitively disproven by Joseph Greenberg in the 1940s, based on racial and anthropological data.

[8] Contrasting proposals of an early emergence, Tom Güldemann has argued that less time may have been required for the divergence than is usually assumed, as it is possible for a language to rapidly restructure due to areal contact, with the evolution of Chadic (and likely also Omotic) serving as pertinent examples.

[95] Roger Blench writes that the debate possesses "a strong ideological flavor", with associations between an Asian origin and "high civilization".

[98] Most scholars more narrowly place the homeland near the geographic center of its present distribution,[20] "in the southeastern Sahara or adjacent Horn of Africa".

[67] Proponents of an origin of Afroasiatic within Africa assume the proto-language to have been spoken by pre-Neolithic hunter-gatherers,[94] arguing that there is no evidence of words in Proto-Afroasiatic related to agriculture or animal husbandry.

Y. Keita, and Paul Newman also argue that archaeology does not support a spread of migrating farmers into Africa, but rather a gradual incorporation of animal husbandry into indigenous foraging cultures.

[103] The main proponent of an Asian origin is the linguist Alexander Militarev,[104] who argues that Proto-Afroasiatic was spoken by early agriculturalists in the Levant and subsequently spread to Africa.

[45] Militarev associates the speakers of Proto-Afroasiatic with the Levantine Post-Natufian Culture, arguing that the reconstructed lexicon of flora and fauna, as well as farming and pastoralist vocabulary indicates that Proto-AA must have been spoken in this area.

[108] Egyptian, Cushitic, Berber, Omotic, and most languages in the Semitic branch require every syllable to begin with a consonant (with the exception of some grammatical prefixes).

[122] Restrictions against the co-occurrence of certain, usually similar, consonants in verbal roots can be found in all Afroasiatic branches, though they are only weakly attested in Chadic and Omotic.

[151] Full or partial reduplication of the verb is often used to derive forms showing repeated action (pluractionality), though it is unclear if this is an inherited feature or has been widely borrowed.

[157] In addition to marking plurals via a number of affixes (with the suffixes -*uu/-*w and -*n(a) widely attested), several AA languages make use of internal vowel change (apophony) and/or insertion (epenthesis).

[175] A widespread pattern of gender and number marking in Afroasiatic, found on demonstratives, articles, adjectives, and relative markers, is a consonant N for masculine, T for feminine, and N for plural.

[184] As there is no evidence for the "prefix conjugation" in Omotic, Chadic, or Egyptian, it is unclear whether this was a Proto-Afroasiatic feature that has been lost in those branches or is a shared innovation among Semitic, Berber, and Cushitic.

[181] A prefix in m- is the most widely attested affix in AA that is used to derive nouns,[155][190] and is one of the features Joseph Greenberg used to diagnose membership in the family.

[191] Christopher Ehret has argued that this prefix is a later development that was not present in Proto-Afro-Asiatic, but rather derived from a PAA indefinite pronoun *m-.

[201][160] Due to its presence in the oldest attested and best-known AA branches, nisba derivation is often thought of as a "quintessentially Afroasiatic feature".