least two tonal phonemes, falling tone, rising tone, and possible a third tone, level tone. Other scholars argue that Proto-AA had a pitch accent and some branches subsequently developed tone. Such scholars postulate that tones developed to compensate for lost or reduced syllables, and note that certain tones are often associated with certain syllable-final consonants. Similarities in grammar, syntax, and morphology Common derivational and morphological processes Some features observed in most or all Afroasiatic languages include: suffixation in nouns, verbs, adjectives, adpositions, and complementizers infixation in nouns, verbs, or adjectives vowel lengthening as a morphological change vowel reduction as a morphological change, often not always to indicate syntactic constituency in tonal languages, tone changes as a morphological change Word order It remains unclear what word order] Proto-Afroasiatic had. Berber, and Egyptian, and most Semitic languages are verb-initial languages, whereas Cushitic, Omotic and some Semitic subgroups are verb-final languages. Proto-Chadic is reconstructed as having verb-initial word order, but most Chadic languages have subject-verb-object word order. Reduplication and gemination Afroasiatic Languages use the processes of reduplication and gemination (which often overlap in meaning) to derive nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs throughout the AA language family. Gemination in particular is one of the typical features of AA. Full or partial reduplication of the verb is often used to derive forms showing repeated action (pluractionality), though it is unclear if this is an inherited feature or has been widely borrowed. Grammatical gender and number marking The assignment of nouns and pronouns to either masculine or feminine gender is present in all branches - but not all languages - of the Afroasiatic family. This sex-based gender system is widely agreed to derive from Proto-Afroasiatic. In most branches, gender is an inherent property of nouns. Additionally, even when nouns are not cognates, they tend to have the same gender throughout Afroasiatic ("gender stability"). A widespread pattern of gender and number marking in Afroasiatic is a consonant N for masculine, T for feminine, and N for plural. This can be found in Semitic, Egyptian, Beja, Berber, and Chadic. A system K (masculine), T (feminine), and H (plural) can be found in Cushitic, Chadic, with masculine K also appearing in Omotic. The feminine marker T is one of the most consistent aspects across the different branches of AA; in addition to deriving feminine nouns in many branches, it also functions as a diminutive, pejorative, and/or singulative marker in