Beja (also called Bedawi, Bedauye, To Bedawie) is an Afro-Asiatic language of the southern coast of the Red Sea, spoken by about two million nomads in parts of Egypt, Sudan, and Eritrea. Current distribution of Human Language Families Most languages are known to belong to language families. ... Map showing the distribution of Afro-Asiatic languages The Afro-Asiatic languages constitute a language family with about 240 languages and over 307 million speakers spread throughout North Africa, East Africa, the Sahel, and Southwest Asia. ... ISO 639-1 is the first part of the ISO 639 international-standard language-code family. ... ISO 639-2:1998 Codes for the representation of names of languages — Part 2: Alpha-3 code Twenty-two of the languages have two three-letter codes: a code for bibliographic use (ISO 639-2/B) a code for terminological use (ISO 639-2/T). ... ISO 639-3 is in process of development as an international standard for language codes. ... The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is a system of phonetic notation devised by linguists to accurately and uniquely represent each of the wide variety of sounds (phones or phonemes) used in spoken human language. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone = sound/voice) is the study of sounds (voice). ... Due to technical limitations, some web browsers may not display some special characters in this article. ... This is a concise version of the International Phonetic Alphabet for English sounds. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Map showing the distribution of Afro-Asiatic languages The Afro-Asiatic languages constitute a language family with about 240 languages and over 307 million speakers spread throughout North Africa, East Africa, the Sahel, and Southwest Asia. ... Location of the Red Sea Image:Red Seaimage. ...

It is usually seen as Cushitic, but several scholars, notably Robert Hetzron (1980), have regarded it as an independent branch of Afro-Asiatic. The Cushitic languages are a subgroup of the Afro-Asiatic languages, named after the Biblical figure Cush by analogy with Semitic. ... Robert Hetzron (1937 – 1997) was a linguist who specialized in Afroasiatic languages and whose work embraced comparative studies, semantic analysis and theoretical aspects of grammar. ...

See also

• Ababde

The Ababda (or Ababde) (the Gebadei of Pliny, possibly the Troglodytes of classical writers), are a nomad tribe of African Bedouins, a subgroup of the Beja people; some still speak the Cushitic Beja language, while others speak Arabic. ...

External links

• An electronic newspaper in Beja ياربُ تِكْوكْوه
• A Beja grammar (in Arabic)
• Ethnologue report on Beja (Bedawi)