Semitic languages
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[TABLE="class: infobox, width: 1"]
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[TH="bgcolor: #FAECC8, colspan: 2, align: center"]Semitic[/TH]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="bgcolor: #FAECC8, colspan: 2, align: center"]Syro-Arabian[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TH="align: left"]Geographic
distribution:[/TH]
[TD]
Western Asia,
North Africa,
Northeast Africa,
Malta[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TH="align: left"]
Linguistic classification:[/TH]
[TD]
Afro-Asiatic
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TH="align: left"]Proto-language:[/TH]
[TD]
Proto-Semitic[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR="class: plainlist"]
[TH="align: left"]Subdivisions:[/TH]
[TD]
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TH="align: left"]
ISO 639-2 /
5:[/TH]
[TD]<samp style="font-family: monospace, Courier; ">
sem</samp>[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TH="align: left"]
Glottolog:[/TH]
[TD]<samp style="font-family: monospace, Courier; ">
semi1276</samp>[SUP]
[1][/SUP][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD="colspan: 2, align: center"]

Approximate historical distribution of Semitic languages.
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</tbody>[/TABLE]
The
Semitic languages are a
language family originating in the
Near East whose living representatives are spoken by more than 470 million people across much of
Western Asia,
North Africa and the
Horn of Africa, as well as in large
expatriate communities in
North America and
Europe. They constitute a branch of the
Afroasiatic language family. The most widely spoken Semitic languages today are (numbers given are for native speakers only)
Arabic (300 million),[SUP]
[2][/SUP]
Amharic(21.8 million),[SUP]
[3][/SUP]
Hebrew (7 million),[SUP]
[4][/SUP][SUP]
[5][/SUP][SUP]
[6][/SUP]
Tigrinya (6.7 million),[SUP]
[7][/SUP] and
Aramaic (550,000).