Ask the Chatbot Games & Quizzes History & Society Science & Tech Biographies Animals & Nature Geography & Travel Arts & Culture ProCon Money Videos
Northwest Semitic languages
References
Images
A diagram shows the family tree of Semitic languages, branching into West Semitic and East Semitic. West Semitic includes Ethiopic, Modern and Old South Arabian, Arabic and its dialects, Maltese, and Northwest Semitic languages like Amorite, Ugaritic, Canaanite, Aramaic, and Modern Hebrew. East Semitic includes Akkadian, Old Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian.
Britannica AI Icon

Northwest Semitic languages

Written by
The Information Architects of Encyclopaedia Britannica

The Information Architects maintain a master list of the topics included in the corpus of  Encyclopædia Britannica, and create and manage the relationships between them.
The Information Architects of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Last updated

Quick Summary

A diagram shows the family tree of Semitic languages, branching into West Semitic and East Semitic. West Semitic includes Ethiopic, Modern and Old South Arabian, Arabic and its dialects, Maltese, and Northwest Semitic languages like Amorite, Ugaritic, Canaanite, Aramaic, and Modern Hebrew. East Semitic includes Akkadian, Old Akkadian, Babylonian, and Assyrian.
Semitic language family Relationships between Semitic languages.

Northwest Semitic is a division of the Semitic language family that includes Aramaic and Canaanitic languages. This group is part of the larger West Semitic branch, with some scholars proposing a Central Semitic subgroup that also includes Arabic due to shared linguistic features.12

Historically, Northwest Semitic languages have a long written record. Ancient examples include Ugaritic, found in texts from the city of Ugarit, and Canaanite languages like Phoenician and Hebrew. Aramaic languages also emerged early, with Old Aramaic inscriptions dating back to the 9th century BCE, and later becoming an administrative language across vast regions. These languages are characterized by specific verbal inflection systems, differing from other Semitic branches.34

Summary created from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles.
4 Britannica Sources
  1. Northwest Semitic
  2. Semitic languages - Classification
  3. Semitic languages - The Northwest Semitic languages and Arabic
  4. Semitic languages - Languages of the past

Ask Britannica AI about this topic

Britannica doesn't have a full article on this topic, so we've curated a list of our relevant coverage.