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Classification

The Egyptian language branch belongs to the Afroasiatic language family. Among the typological features of Egyptian that are typically Afroasiatic are its fusional morphology, nonconcatenative morphology, a series of emphatic consonants, a three-vowel system /a i u/, a nominal feminine suffix * -at, a nominal prefix m-, an adjectival suffix -ī and characteristic personal verbal affixes. Of the other Afroasiatic branches, linguists have variously suggested that the Egyptian language shares its greatest affinities with Berber and Semitic languages, particularly Arabic (which is spoken in Egypt today) and Hebrew. However, other scholars have argued that the Egyptian language shared closer linguistic ties with northeastern African regions.

There are two theories that seek to establish the cognate sets between Egyptian and Afroasiatic, the traditional theory and the neuere Komparatistik, founded by Semiticist Otto Rössler. According to the neuere Komparatistik, in Egyptian, the Proto-Afroasiatic voiced consonants */d z ð/ developed into pharyngeal ⟨ ꜥ ⟩ /ʕ/: Egyptian ꜥr.t 'portal', Semitic dalt 'door'. The traditional theory instead disputes the values given to those consonants by the neuere Komparatistik, instead connecting ⟨ ꜥ ⟩ with Semitic /ʕ/ and /ɣ/. Both schools agree that Afroasiatic */l/ merged with Egyptian ⟨ n ⟩, ⟨ r ⟩, ⟨ ꜣ ⟩, and ⟨ j ⟩ in the dialect on which the written language was based, but it was preserved in other Egyptian varieties. They also agree that original */k g ḳ/ palatalise to ⟨ ṯ j ḏ ⟩ in some environments and are preserved as ⟨ k g q ⟩ in others.

The Egyptian language has many biradical and perhaps monoradical roots, in contrast to the Semitic preference for triradical roots. Egyptian is probably more conservative, and Semitic likely underwent later regularizations converting roots into the triradical pattern.

Although Egyptian is the oldest Afroasiatic language documented in written form, its morphological repertoire is very different from that of the rest of the Afroasiatic languages in general, and Semitic languages in particular. There are multiple possibilities: perhaps Egyptian had already undergone radical changes from Proto-Afroasiatic before it was recorded; or the Afroasiatic family has so far been studied with an excessively Semitocentric approach; or, as G. W. Tsereteli suggests, Afroasiatic is an allogenetic rather than a genetic group of languages.