Semitic is a branch of the Afroasiatic language family spoken across the Middle East and North Africa, including living languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic, Tigrinya and Aramaic, alongside extinct languages such as Akkadian and Phoenician. With more than 300 million speakers, chiefly of Arabic, it is the most widely spoken branch of Afroasiatic.
Facts
RegionWest Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, and Malta, with additional immigrant and expatriate communities in North America, Europe, and Australasia 1 Speaker Count Proto-Language StatusReconstructed as Proto-Semitic, a reconstruction originally based primarily on the conservative phonology and morphology of Arabic 1 Sources
1. Wikipedia: Semitic Languages
WikipediaLead section, paragraph 1: geographic distribution sentence
They are spoken by more than 460 million people across much of West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Malta, and in large immigrant and expatriate communities in North America, Europe, and Australasia.
Lead section, paragraph 1: population figure sentence
They are spoken by more than 460 million people across much of West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Malta, and in large immigrant and expatriate communities in North America, Europe, and Australasia.
Historical linguistics section: Proto-Semitic reconstruction basis
The reconstruction of Proto-Semitic (PS) was originally based primarily on Arabic, whose phonology and morphology (particularly in Classical Arabic) is very conservative, and which preserves as contrastive 28 out of the evident 29 consonantal phonemes.
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