ABSTRACT
A number of scholars were already convinced that certain languages and language families of Africa, specifically Ancient Egyptian and Coptic, the Berber languages of North Africa, and newly discovered Cushitic languages in and around the Horn of Africa might be historically related as “sister languages” to Semitic. In a series of articles in the 1950s, published as a single monograph in 1963, Greenberg, in the context of a project aimed at a “complete genetic classification of the languages of Africa”, proposed grouping the languages of Africa into six super-families. Egyptian, the longest continuously attested language known, was spoken for more than four millennia in the Nile valley and delta from about 3000 bce to 1300 ce. Beja is spoken by about 3,000,000 individuals belonging to various groups living in the Red Sea coastal plain and hills, between the Egyptian-Sudanese border and northern Eritrea.
