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
Afro-Asiatic language family, the only branch of that family to be spoken not only in
Africa but also in
Asia.
The most widely spoken Semitic language today is Arabic[1] (322 million native speakers, approx 422 million total speakers)[2][3]. It is followed by Amharic (27 million),[4][5] Tigrinya (about 6.7 million),[6] and Hebrew (about 5 million).[7]
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 only Semitic language to be written in the Latin alphabet and is the only official Semitic language within the European Union.
The term "Semitic" for these languages, after Shem, the son of Noah in the Bible, is etymologically a misnomer in some ways (see Semitic), but is nonetheless in standard use.
