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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 ...
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 ...
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 of an Afroasiatic ...
The languages of the Americas often can be grouped together into linguistic areas or Sprachbunds (also known as convergence areas). The linguistic areas identified so far deserve more research to determine their validity. Knowing about Sprachbunds helps historical linguists differentiate between shared areal traits and true genetic relationship.
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 ...
Amharic is an Afro-Asiatic language of the Southwest Semitic group and is related to Geʽez, or Ethiopic, the liturgical language of the Ethiopian Orthodox church; Amharic is written in a slightly modified form of the alphabet used for writing the Geʽez language. There are 34 basic characters, each of which has seven forms depending on which ...
Amharic is a South Ethio-Semitic language, along with Gurage, Argobba and others. [ 25 ] [ 26 ] [ 27 ] Some time before the 1st century AD, the North and South branches of Ethio-Semitic diverged. [ 27 ] [ 28 ] Due to the social stratification of the time, the Cushitic Agaw adopted the South Semitic language and mixed with the Semitic population.
The West Semitic languages are a proposed major sub-grouping of Semitic languages. The term was first coined in 1883 by Fritz Hommel. [1][2][3] The grouping [4] supported by Semiticists like Robert Hetzron and John Huehnergard divides the Semitic language family into two branches: Eastern and Western. [5]