Moabite language

Moabite is an extinct Northwest Semitic language of the Canaanite group, spoken in the region the Bible calls Moab, which lies in the central and western part of modern Jordan, during the early first millennium BC. Almost everything known about it comes from a very small body of inscriptions, chiefly the Mesha Stele, the only extensive text in the language, along with the three-line El-Kerak Inscription, a few seals and an altar inscription of about 800 BC from Khirbat Ataruz. Together with the poorly attested Ammonite and Edomite it belonged to the Canaanite dialect continuum that also contains Hebrew and Phoenician. Its distinguishing features include a plural in -in rather than -im, retention of the feminine ending -at, and a verb form with an infixed -t-. It was written in a variant of the Phoenician alphabet, from right to left. Scholars still debate how far Moabite is a language of its own rather than a dialect of Hebrew, and what the vertical strokes on the Mesha Stele mean.