[1] The group is generally classified as belonging to the Afroasiatic language family, but this is disputed by some linguists.

Fleming (1969) argued that it should instead be classified as an independent branch of Afroasiatic, a view which Bender (1971) established to most linguists' satisfaction,[4] though a few linguists maintain the West Cushitic position[5][6] or that only South Omotic forms a separate branch, with North Omotic remaining part of Cushitic.

[11][12][13] The Aroid (South Omotic) languages were first included in "West Cushitic" by Greenberg; they were excluded from earlier classifications by Italian Cushiticists such as Enrico Cerulli and Mario Martino Moreno,[5] and their inclusion in Omotic remains contested.

These four families are also accepted by Güldemann (2018), who similarly doubts the validity of Omotic as a unified group.

[2] The Omotic languages have a morphology that is partly agglutinative and partly fusional: Inflection through suprasegmental morphemes is found in individual languages such as Dizi and Bench; Historically, these are partly reflexes of affixes: The nominal morphology is based on a nominative-accusative-absolutive system; For verbal morphology, a complex inflection according to categories such as tense/aspect, interrogative - declarative and affirmative - negative as well as agreement is more predicative characterizing forms with the subject.

The Omotic languages have on average slightly less than thirty consonant phonemes, which is a comparatively high number, but is also found in other primary branches of Afro-Asiatic.

What is typical for the non-glottal plosives is that they are each represented by a voiced, a voiceless, and an ejective phoneme; All three types can also be found in fricatives and affricates.

A number of omotic languages have an absolutive case, which marks the citation form and the direct object (examples from Wolaita):[17] Some common case suffixes are: A typological peculiarity, which is also isolated within Omotic, is the person and gender dependency of the nominative in Bench (either -i˧ or -a˧, depending on the person): In most languages, the singular is unmarked, while the plural has its own suffix.