As a literary language, Arabic produced an immense amount of scholarly and artistic literature, much of which was recorded in Kūfic script, the earliest form of Arabic calligraphy. By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica. For example: Terms given in brackets are not derived from the respective Proto-Semitic roots, though they may also derive from Proto-Semitic (as does e.g. (this root also exists in Arabic and is used to form words with a close meaning to "writing", such as ṣaḥāfa "journalism", and ṣaḥīfa "newspaper" or "parchment"). It is second only to the Indo-European language family in terms of number of speakers. Standard Arabic is spoken as a first language by more than 200 million people living in a broad area stretching from the Atlantic coast of northern Africa to western Iran; an additional 250 million people in the region speak Standard Arabic as a secondary language. A Western Aramaic dialect is still spoken in the vicinity of Maʿlūlā, Syria, and Eastern Aramaic survives in the form of Ṭuroyo (native to an area in eastern Turkey), Modern Mandaic (in western Iran), and the Neo-Syriac or Assyrian dialects (in Iraq, Turkey, and Iran). Both the Near East and North Africa saw an influx of Muslim Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula, followed later by non-Semitic Muslim Iranian and Turkic peoples. The Semitic languages are notable for their nonconcatenative morphology. The Old Arabic language, although originating in the Arabian peninsula, first emerged in written form in the 1st to 4th centuries CE in the southern regions of present-day Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and Syria. Despite the fact that they are no longer regularly spoken, several Semitic languages retain great significance because of the roles that they play in the expression of religious culture—such as Biblical Hebrew in Judaism, Geʿez in Ethiopian Christianity, and Syriac in Chaldean and Assyrian Christianity. On the Nature and Development of Semitic Roots", "On the Semitic Languages, and their relations with the Indo-European Class. Words are composed out of roots not so much by adding prefixes or suffixes, but rather by filling in the vowels between the root consonants (although prefixes and suffixes are often added as well). The Chinese (or Sinitic) languages constitute a recognized family of closely related languages sharing a common ancestor, although the wider genetic affiliations of Chinese remain a matter of dispute. The Galilean and Babylonian dialects played important roles in the transmission of the traditions of Judaism. Under the Achaemenian Empire, varieties of Imperial Aramaic were used throughout the region for administrative purposes. the earliest attested being the East Semitic Akkadian of the Mesopotamian, northeast Levantine and southeastern Anatolian polities of Akkad, Assyria and Babylonia (effectively modern Iraq, southeast Turkey and northeast Syria), and the also East Semitic Eblaite language of the kingdom of Ebla in the northeastern Levant. [16][18] In the 19th century, "Semitic" became the conventional name; however, an alternative name, "Syro-Arabian languages", was later introduced by James Cowles Prichard and used by some writers.[18]. Semitic languages occur in written form from a very early historical date, with East Semitic Akkadian and Eblaite texts (written in a script adapted from Sumerian cuneiform) appearing from the 30th century BCE and the 25th century BCE in Mesopotamia and the north eastern Levant respectively. The most widely spoken Semitic languages today are (numbers given are for native speakers only) Arabic (300 million),[7] Amharic (~22 million),[8] Tigrinya (7 million),[9] Hebrew (~5 million native/L1 speakers),[10] Tigre (~1.05 million), Aramaic (575,000 to 1 million largely Assyrian fluent speakers)[11][12][13] and Maltese (483,000 speakers).[14].
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