Semitic - Geography

Geography

Semitic peoples and their languages, in both modern and ancient historic times, have covered a broad area bridging North Africa, Western Asia, Asia Minor and the Arabian Peninsula. The earliest historic (written) evidences of them are found in the Fertile Crescent (Mesopotamia), an area encompassing the Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian civilizations along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (modern Iraq), extending northwest into southern Asia Minor (modern Turkey) and the Levant (modern Syria and Lebanon) along the eastern Mediterranean. Early traces of Semitic speakers are found, too, in South Arabian inscriptions in Yemen, Eritrea, Northern Ethiopia, and after this in Carthage (modern Tunisia) and later still, in Roman times, in Nabataean inscriptions from Petra (modern Jordan) south into Arabia.

Later historical Semitic languages also spread into North Africa in two widely separated periods. The first expansion occurred with the ancient Phoenicians from around the 9th century BC, along the southern Mediterranean Sea all the way to the Atlantic Ocean (Phoenician colonies which included ancient Rome's nemesis Carthage). The second, a millennium later, was the expansion of the Muslim armies and Arabic in the 7th-8th centuries AD, which, at their height, controlled the Iberian Peninsula (until 1492) and Sicily. Arab Muslim expansion is also responsible for modern Arabic's presence from Mauritania, on the Atlantic coast of West Africa, to the Red Sea in the northeastern corner of Africa, and its reach south along the Nile River as far as the northern half of Sudan, where, as the national language, non-Arab Sudanese even farther south must learn it.

Modern Hebrew was reintroduced in the 20th century, and together with Arabic, is a national language in Israel. Western Aramaic dialects remain spoken in Malula near Damascus. Eastern Mesopotamian Neo-Aramaic is spoken along the northern border of Syria and throughout Iraq, Southeast-Turkey (Turabdin), in far northwestern Iran and in Armenia, Georgia and southern Russia. These speakers are predominantly ethnic Assyrians (also known as Chaldo-Assyrians). Mandaean Aramaic is still spoken in parts of southern and northern Iraq. Semitic languages and are also found in the Horn of Africa, especially Eritrea and Ethiopia. Tigrinya, a North Ethiopic dialect, has around six million speakers in Eritrea and Tigray. In Eritrea, Tigre is the language of around 800,000 Muslims. Amharic is the national language of Ethiopia and is spoken by at least 10 million Ethiopian Orthodox Christians. Semitic languages today are also spoken in Malta (where an Italian-influenced language derived from Siculo-Arabic is spoken) and on the island of Socotra in the Indian Ocean between Yemen and Somalia, where a dying vestige of South Arabian is spoken in the form of Soqotri. The Maltese language is the only officially recognized Semitic language of the European Union.