Afro-Asiatic

The Afro-Asiatic superfamily includes several language families spoken in Northern Africa and the Middle East, such as Semitic, Cushitic, Berber, and Chadic. Coptic (Ancient Egyptian), written in heiroglyphs, was also an Afro-Asiatic language, as were some other important ancient languages such as Aramaic and Phoenician. Due to the remarkable word-formation patterns of the Semitic languages, that group evolved a writing system which the symbols denote the consonants of each word and leave but the vowels. Phoenician writing inspired the Indo-European speaking Ancient Greeks to create the first genuine alphabet, which includes symbols for both consonants and vowels.

Other Afro-Asiatic languages are Amharic, Hausa, Maltese, and Tigrinya.

Semitic

Arabic: Notes: The many dialects of Arabic have necessitated a Modern Standard Arabic, which is represented above. I'm eager to add any other dialects as well. Speaker: Osama Hamad (N), Steve Hewitt (S)

Hebrew: Notes: Hebrew is not only written right to left, but the vowels are left out. Verbs and adjectives have different endings based on the gender of whom they refer to. Hebrew essentially died out as a spoken language, although religious use continued, until a Jewish homeland was established in Israel and with great effort Hebrew was successfully revived. Speaker: Nanette Goldman (S), Elizabeth Weintraub (S)

Cushitic

Oromo: Notes: One of the major languages of Ethiopia. Speaker: Naima Mohamed Ibrahim (N)

Somali: Notes: Speaker: Ali Ali Ali (N)