ABSTRACT
The Semitic languages have the longest recorded history of any language family, spanning some 4,500 years from the first Akkadian and Eblaite texts in the mid-third millennium bce; one of the most widely spoken of the world’s languages; Amharic, Tigrinya and other related languages in Ethiopia and Eritrea. For ease of reference, there is a tabular overview of the subgrouping of the Semitic languages; the overview is then followed by a more detailed review of the subbranches and individual languages of the family. Akkadian, along with the extinct isolate Sumerian, was the language of the great civilizations of ancient Mesopotamia. Akkadian was usually written in a cuneiform script, logo-syllabic in nature, that was borrowed from Sumerian. Eblaite is attested in several thousand cuneiform texts of the 24th century from the city of Ebla. What is clear is that Eblaite is very closely related to Akkadian, closely enough that some scholars consider it to be a dialect of Akkadian.
