The Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 467 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa. They constitute a branch of the Afroasiatic language family, the only branch of that family spoken in Asia. Like the other branches, it is also spoken in Africa.
The most widely spoken Semitic language by far today is Arabic (322 million native speakers,...
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The Semitic languages are a group of related languages whose living representatives are spoken by more than 467 million people across much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Horn of Africa. They constitute a branch of the Afroasiatic language family, the only branch of that family spoken in Asia. Like the other branches, it is also spoken in Africa.
The most widely spoken Semitic language by far today is Arabic (322 million native speakers, roughly 422 million total speakers). It is followed by Amharic (27 million), Tigrinya (about 6.7 million), and Hebrew (about 5 million).
Semitic languages are attested in written form from a very early date, with texts in Eblaite and Akkadian appearing from around the middle of the third millennium BC, written in a script adapted from Sumerian cuneiform. The other scripts used to write Semitic languages are alphabetic. Among them are the Ugaritic, Phoenician, Aramaic, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, South Arabian, and Ge'ez alphabets. Maltese is the...
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