Ethiopia is a multilingual and multicultural country that has more than 80 different languages of which Afar is one of them. Afaraf (Afar language) is the name the Afar people gave to their language. Afaraf is one of the languages of lowland east Cushitic Sub-group along with Afaan Oromo and Afka Somali etc. It is particularly close to Saho which also belongs to this sub-group of Cushitic family. With Saho, Afaraf makes the northern-most group of the afore-mentioned sub family. In the estimation of many observers who perfectly know both languages, Afaraf shares nearly two thirds of its vocabulary with Saho.

As has been mentioned above, Afaraf is of the same Cushitic origin to which Afka Somali, Afaan Oromo and other Cushitic languages belong to. It shares much of its grammatical structure with them. Nonetheless, it has its own peculiarity by which it differs from them. Contrary to Afaan Oromo and Afka Somali, where qualifying nouns mostly follow the qualify adjectives, from Afaraf ones predominantly precede the nouns they qualify.