Semitic

The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic family, comprising around 70–80 languages spoken by approximately 330–400 million people. They include Arabic, the world's most widely spoken Semitic language and an official language of 22 countries; Hebrew, uniquely revived as a spoken vernacular in the 19th–20th centuries after centuries as a liturgical language; and Amharic, the official language of Ethiopia and the world's second most widely spoken Semitic language by native speakers.

The reconstructed homeland of Proto-Semitic remains debated. The Levantine hypothesis, supported by the distribution of early Semitic speakers in the ancient Near East (Akkadian in Mesopotamia, Canaanite-Phoenician in the Levant, Ugaritic on the Syrian coast), places its origin in or near the Fertile Crescent. The African hypothesis, supported by the presence of the most diverse and archaic Semitic languages in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa (South Semitic subgroup), proposes a Northeastern African origin with subsequent spread into Asia.

The Semitic languages have been uniquely important in human history through their association with three of the world's major religions. Hebrew is the language of the Torah and the ancient Israelite religious and literary tradition. Aramaic was the spoken language of Jesus and the lingua franca of the ancient Near East for over a millennium; it survives today in isolated communities in Syria, Iraq, and the diaspora. Arabic is the language of the Quran and became, through the Islamic conquests of the 7th–8th centuries CE, the prestige language of an empire stretching from Spain to Central Asia and a vehicle for the transmission of ancient Greek philosophy, medicine, and mathematics to the medieval world.

The Semitic writing systems hold special significance in the history of literacy. The Proto-Sinaitic script (c. 1900–1800 BCE), developed by Semitic-speaking workers in Egyptian turquoise mines, was the ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet — from which virtually all alphabets in use today, including Greek, Latin, Arabic, Hebrew, and Ethiopic, descend. This single invention, originating in a Semitic-language context, transformed literacy from an elite pictographic technology to a widely learnable phonetic system.