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The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They include Arabic, Amharic, Aramaic, Hebrew, Maltese and numerous other ancient and modern languages. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, North Africa, [a] the Horn of Africa, [b][c] Malta, [d] and in large immigrant and expatriate ...
Approximate historical distribution of the Semitic languages in the Ancient Near East.. Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples or Proto-Semitic people were speakers of Semitic languages who lived throughout the ancient Near East and North Africa, including the Levant, Mesopotamia, the Arabian Peninsula and Carthage from the 3rd millennium BC until the end of antiquity, with some, such as Arabs ...
Semitic people or Semites is an obsolete term for an ethnic, cultural or racial group [2][3][4][5] associated with people of the Middle East, including Arabs, Jews, Akkadians, and Phoenicians. The terminology is now largely unused outside the grouping "Semitic languages" in linguistics. [6][7][8] First used in the 1770s by members of the ...
Central Semitic languages[ 1][ 2] are one of the three groups of West Semitic languages, alongside Modern South Arabian languages and Ethiopian Semitic languages. Central Semitic can itself be further divided into two groups: Arabic and Northwest Semitic. Northwest Semitic languages largely fall into the Canaanite languages (such as Phoenician ...
Afroasiatic languages. The Afroasiatic languages (or Afro-Asiatic, sometimes Afrasian), also known as Hamito-Semitic or Semito-Hamitic, are a language family (or "phylum") of about 400 languages spoken predominantly in West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and parts of the Sahara and Sahel. [4] Over 500 million people are native speakers ...
Northwest Semitic is a division of the Semitic languages comprising the indigenous languages of the Levant. It emerged from Proto-Semitic in the Early Bronze Age . It is first attested in proper names identified as Amorite in the Middle Bronze Age .
The Ethiopian Semitic languages collectively have by far the greatest numbers of modern native speakers of any Semitic language other than Arabic. Eritrea's main languages are mainly Tigrinya and Tigre , which are North Ethiopic languages, and Amharic (South Ethiopic) is the main language spoken in Ethiopia (along with Tigrinya in the northern ...
The East Semitic group is attested by three distinct languages, Akkadian, Eblaite and possibly Kishite, all of which have been long extinct. [3][2][4][5][6][7] They were influenced by the non-Semitic Sumerian language and adopted cuneiform writing. East Semitic languages stand apart from other Semitic languages, which are traditionally called ...