or Assyro-Babylonian language
It is known from a great many inscriptions, seals, and clay tablets in cuneiform writing . Akkadian supplanted Sumerian as the major spoken language of southern Mesopotamia by 2000 BC and about this time split into an Assyrian dialect spoken in the northeast and a Babylonian dialect spoken in the south. Akkadian died out as a vernacular in the first half of the 1st millennium BC, being effectively replaced by {{link=Aramaic language">Aramaic in Mesopotamia, though it continued to be written until about the 1st century AD.