SEMITIC LANGUAGES

group of languages spoken in northern Africa and the Middle East that constitutes one of the branches of the Afro-Asiatic (formerly Hamito-Semitic) language family. (The other branches are Egyptian, Berber, Cushitic, and Chadic.) The Semitic languages are divided into four groups: (1) Northern Peripheral, or Northeastern, with only one language, ancient Akkadian; (2) Northern Central, or Northwestern, including the ancient Canaanite, Amorite, Ugaritic, Phoenician and Punic, and Aramaic languages and ancient and modern Syriac and Hebrew; (3) Southern Central, including Arabic and Maltese; and (4) Southern Peripheral, including South Arabic and the languages of northern Ethiopia. Many consonants characteristic of the Semitic sound systems are formed at the back of the mouth and in the throat. Words in the Semitic languages are formed from a root (composed of consonants) that gives the basic meaning of the word and a vowel pattern that expresses shades of the basic meaning. Originally there was no form for the definite article, although forms developed in all the known languages of the group except Akkadian (spoken in ancient Mesopotamia) and Ge'ez (spoken in Ethiopia). Semitic originally had three cases (subjective, or nominative; objective, or accusative; and possessive, or genitive), but the suffixes indicating those cases are completely preserved only in some dialects of Akkadian and in Classical Arabic. All languages of the group have masculine and feminine gender. The modern languages have developed tense forms, in contrast to the earlier Semitic verb, which had aspects (expressing the manner or mode of an action) rather than tenses (expressing the time of an action).