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Language Lineage

West Semitic

The suffix conjugation (qatal-) became a past tense. Arabic kataba and Hebrew kātav mean 'he wrote', while Akkadian uses the matching form as a stative describing a state.

c. 3rd millennium BCE – presentThe Levant and the Arabian Peninsula, later the Horn of Africa
On this page
  1. Origins
  2. The First Alphabet
  3. Where its languages are spoken
  4. Turning points
  5. Contested classifications

01

Origins

West Semitic takes in every Semitic language except Akkadian and Eblaite. It is defined mainly by a change in the verb: the suffixed form that Akkadian used for states ('he is seated') became a general past tense, which is why kataba in Arabic and kātav in Hebrew mean 'he wrote'. The branch divides into Central Semitic (Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew and their relatives) and the Semitic languages of the Horn of Africa and southern Arabia.

Many of its speakers were herders and traders on the desert edge, and it is among them that writing took its most consequential step.

02

The First Alphabet

Around 1900–1800 BCE, Semitic-speaking workers in Egypt and Sinai adapted a small set of Egyptian hieroglyphs to write their own language. Each sign stood for the first consonant of its Semitic name: a picture of an ox head (ʾalp) for ʾ, a house (bayt) for b. The earliest examples, from Wadi el-Hol in Egypt and Serabit el-Khadim in Sinai, are short and hard to read, but the principle, one sign for one consonant, spread. Through Phoenician it became the ancestor of the Greek, Latin, Hebrew and Arabic scripts. The South Arabian branch of the same invention produced the Ge'ez script of Ethiopia.

On the map

Where its languages are spoken

IsraelLebanonPalestineKuwaitMalta
Spoken todayShading marks whole countries, not the regions within them.
  1. EgyptArabic c. 100 million
  2. EthiopiaEthiosemitic c. 45 million · Old South Arabian
  3. SudanArabic c. 40 million
  4. AlgeriaArabic c. 35 million
  5. IraqArabic c. 35 million · Aramaic
  6. YemenModern South Arabian · Old South Arabian · Arabic c. 30 million
  7. MoroccoArabic c. 25 million
  8. Saudi ArabiaModern South Arabian · Old South Arabian · Arabic c. 20 million
17 more countries
  1. SyriaArabic c. 20 million · Aramaic
  2. TunisiaArabic c. 12 million
  3. JordanArabic c. 10 million
  4. IsraelArabic c. 2 million · Canaanite c. 5 million
  5. LibyaArabic c. 6 million
  6. LebanonArabic c. 5 million
  7. PalestineArabic c. 5 million
  8. EritreaEthiosemitic c. 3 million · Old South Arabian
  9. OmanModern South Arabian · Old South Arabian · Arabic c. 3 million
  10. ChadArabic c. 2 million
  11. KuwaitArabic c. 1.5 million
  12. MaltaArabic c. 500,000 (Maltese)
  13. GermanyAramaic
  14. IranAramaic
  15. SwedenAramaic
  16. TurkeyAramaic
  17. United StatesAramaic

Figures are rough first-language estimates, rounded, from censuses and Ethnologue. Counts for small or scattered communities are especially uncertain.

Rings along the limb

Turning points

Oldest first.

  1. Splitc. 3rd millennium BCEContested

    West Semitic divides

    West Semitic separates into Central Semitic and the southern languages of Arabia and the Horn of Africa. The internal structure of the southern group is uncertain, and the date is approximate.

    Sources (1)
    • Huehnergard, John & Aaron D. Rubin. 2011. Phyla and waves: Models of classification of the Semitic languages. In The Semitic Languages: An International Handbook, ed. Stefan Weninger. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
  2. Writingc. 1900 – 1700 BCEContested

    The first alphabet

    Semitic speakers in Egypt and Sinai use hieroglyph shapes for the first consonant of their Semitic names (ox head ʾalp → ʾ). The Wadi el-Hol and Serabit el-Khadim inscriptions are the earliest known alphabetic writing. Their exact date and readings are debated.

    Sources (1)
    • Darnell, John Coleman, et al. 2005. Two early alphabetic inscriptions from the Wadi el-Ḥôl. Annual of the American Schools of Oriental Research 59.

Outside the tree

Contested classifications

These disagreements may never be settled. Each position is given with its grounds, and no side is declared correct.

  • Widely accepted

    South Semitic

    Ethiosemitic, Modern South Arabian and Old South Arabian share an ancestor within West Semitic

    Evidence for

    These languages keep the old imperfective pattern (Ge'ez yəqättəl) that Central Semitic replaced, share some vocabulary, and are neighbours across the Red Sea. Most handbooks group them together.

    Evidence against

    Keeping an old form is not a shared innovation, and Huehnergard and Rubin find few changes that only these languages share. Old South Arabian may be closer to Central Semitic. For this reason the tree draws Ethiosemitic and both South Arabian groups directly from West Semitic, without a South Semitic node.

    Sources (1)
    • Huehnergard, John & Aaron D. Rubin. 2011. Phyla and waves: Models of classification of the Semitic languages. In The Semitic Languages: An International Handbook, ed. Stefan Weninger. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.