Northwest Semitic Languages - Historical Development

Historical Development

The time period for the split of Northwest Semitic from Proto-Semitic or from other Semitic groups is uncertain. The first attestation of a Northwest Semitic language is of Ugaritic in the 14th Century B.C.

During the early 1st Millennium, the Phoenician language was spread throughout the Mediterranean by Phoenician colonists, most notably to Carthage in today's Tunisia. The Phoenician alphabet is of fundamental importance in human history, as the source of the Greek alphabet and later Latin alphabet, and of the Aramaic/Square Hebrew and Arabic writing systems as well.

By the 6th Century B.C. the use of Aramaic spread throughout the Northwest Semitic region (see Imperial Aramaic), largely driving the other Northwest Semitic languages to extinction. The ancient Judaeans adopted Aramaic for daily use, and the latter part of the Old Testament is written in it. Hebrew was preserved, however, as a Jewish liturgical language and language of scholarship, and resurrected in the 19th Century, with modern adaptations, to become the Modern Hebrew language of today's Israel.

With the Muslim expansion in the 7th Century A.D., Arabic largely replaced Aramaic throughout the region. Aramaic survives today as the liturgical language of the Syriac Christian Church, and is spoken in modern dialects by small and endangered populations scattered throughout the Middle East.