Afar is a Cushitic language spoken by around 2 million people across the Horn of Africa — primarily in northeastern Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Djibouti, where it has official status. The Afar people are traditionally pastoralists, and the Afar region (Danakil) is one of the hottest inhabited places on Earth. The US Afar-speaking community is very small, with translation requests overwhelmingly tied to USCIS asylum and refugee cases from the wider Horn of Africa resettlement flows. Afar uses a Latin-based alphabet known as Qafar Feera, standardised in the 1970s.