The Database of Afro-Asiatic Basic Lexicons (DAABL) is a project that addresses questions of cognates, sound correspondences, and relationships between the branches of the Afro-Asiatic language family. DAABL focuses on basic vocabulary items to re-evaluate previously proposed cognates, generates new cognate pairings, and will culminate in a new list of sound correspondences between the different Afro-Asiatic languages. Basic vocabulary items are lexical items that are core and universal to human experience — such as personal pronouns, body parts, the numbers 1–5, and common verbs such as “eat” and “die.” The universality of these concepts reduces the chance that words for these core items would be borrowed through language contact. Because of this resistance to lexical borrowing, basic vocabulary items provide linguists with more secure cognates than other types of words. Sound correspondences are when a sound in one language regularly corresponds to a sound in another related languag