The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic), also known as Hamito-Semitic, or Semito-Hamitic, and sometimes also as Afrasian, are a language family of about 300 languages that are spoken predominantly in the geographic subregions of Western Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahara/Sahel. With the exception of its Semitic branch, all branches of the Afroasiatic family are exclusively native to the African continent. Afroasiatic languages have over 500 million native speakers, which is the fourth-largest number of native speakers of any language family (after Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, and Niger–Congo). The phylum has six branches: Berber, Chadic, Cushitic, Egyptian, Semitic, and Omotic. The most widely spoken modern Afroasiatic language or dialect continuum by far is Arabic, a de facto group of distinct language varieties within the Semitic branch. The languages that evolved from Proto-Arabic have around 313 million native speakers, concentrated primarily in the Middle East and North Africa. In addition to the languages spoken today, Afroasiatic includes many ancient languages, such as Egyptian, which forms a distinct branch of the family; and within the Semitic family, Akkadian, Hebrew, Phoenician, other Canaanite languages, Amorite, Ugaritic and Aramaic. While there is no consensus among historical linguists concerning the original homeland of the Afroasiatic family or the period when the parent language (i.e. Proto-Afroasiatic) was spoken, most agree that it was located within a region of Northeast Africa. Proposed specific locations include the Horn of Africa, Egypt, the eastern Sahara, and the Levant. Name In current scholarship, the most common names used for the family are Afroasiatic, Hamito-Semitic, and Semito-Hamitic., with the latter two having fallen out of favor in English but still seeing frequent usage in other languages, such as German. Other proposed names which have not found widespread acceptance among the linguistic community include Erythraic, Lisramic, Noahitic, and Lamekhite. Friedrich Müller introduced the name "Hamito-Semitic" to describe the family in his , published in 1876. Each component of this term was derived from the name of a Biblical son of Noah as detailed in the Book of Genesis: Semitic from his first-born son Shem, and Hamitic from his second son Ham (). Each of Noah's sons was traditionally presented as being the common ancestor of several apparently-related people groups, with Shem understood by the original audience as being the common ancestor of the Jews, Assyrians, and Arameans, among others, and Ham seen as the ancestor of the Egyptians and