The grouping is controversial and several alternate classifications supplanting South Semitic have been proposed in recent decades.

[3] A 2009 study by Andrew Kitchen and Christopher Ehret amongst others, based on using a Bayesian model to estimate language change, concluded that the latter viewpoint is more probable, with origins in Southern Arabia, and subsequent migration into the Horn of Africa around 2800 years ago.

[6] Evidence for movements across South Arabia are consistent with some recent genomic findings,[7] which find strong association with the movement and ancestry of human population groups speaking the Afro-Asiatic Semitic languages.

[8] According to another hypothesis supported by many scholars, Semitic originated from an offshoot of a still earlier language in North Africa and desertification made some of its speakers migrate in the fourth millennium BCE into what is now Ethiopia, others northwest into West Asia.

Geʽez continues to be used in Eritrea and Ethiopia as a liturgical language for the Orthodox Tewahedo churches.