The contemporary Afroasiatic languages are spoken in West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, parts of the Sahara and Sahel, and Malta. The various hypotheses for the Afroasiatic Urheimat are distributed throughout this territory; that is, it is generally assumed that proto-Afroasiatic was spoken in some region where Afroasiatic languages are still spoken today. However, there is argument as to which part of the contemporary Afroasiatic speech area corresponds with the original homeland. The majority of scholars today contend that Afroasiatic languages arose somewhere in Northeast Africa.
