Canaanite languages


The Canaanite languages, or Canaanite dialects, are one of the three subgroups of the Northwest Semitic languages, the others being Aramaic and Ugaritic. They include Hebrew, Phoenician/Carthaginian, Amorite, Ammonite, Ekronite, Moabite and Edomite which were all mutually intelligible, being no more differentiated than geographical varieties of Modern English.
They were spoken by the ancient Semitic people of the Canaan and Levant regions, an area encompassing what is today Israel, Jordan, Sinai, Lebanon, Syria, the Palestinian territories and also some fringe areas of southwestern Turkey, southwestern Iraq and the northern Arabian Peninsula. The Canaanites are broadly defined to include the Hebrews, Amalekites, Ammonites, Amorites, Edomites, Ekronites, Israelites, Phoenicians, Moabites and Suteans. Although the Amorites are included among the Canaanite peoples, their language is sometimes not considered to be a Canaanite language but closely related.
The Canaanite languages continued to be everyday spoken languages until at least the 4th century CE. Hebrew is the only living Canaanite language today, having remained in continuous use by many Jews well into the Middle Ages as a liturgical language, it also remained a liturgical language among Samaritans, and as a literary language and for commerce between disparate diasporic Jewish communities. It was then revived by Jews as an everyday spoken language in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and became the main language of the Jews of Palestine and later the State of Israel.
This family of languages has the distinction of being the first historically attested group of languages to use an alphabet, derived from the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, to record their writings, as opposed to the far earlier Cuneiform logographic/syllabic writing of the region.
The primary reference for extra-biblical Canaanite inscriptions, together with Aramaic inscriptions, is the German-language book Kanaanäische und Aramäische Inschriften, from which inscriptions are often referenced as KAI n.

Classification and sources

The Canaanite languages or dialects can be split into the following:

North Canaan

Other possible Canaanite languages:
Some distinctive typological features of Canaanite in relation to Aramaic are:
, revived in the modern era from an extinct dialect of the ancient Israelites preserved in literature, poetry, liturgy; also known as Classical Hebrew, the oldest form of the language attested in writing. The original pronunciation of Biblical Hebrew is accessible only through reconstruction. It may also include Ancient Samaritan Hebrew, a dialect formerly spoken by the ancient Samaritans. The main sources of Classical Hebrew are the Hebrew Bible, and inscriptions such as the Gezer calendar and Khirbet Qeiyafa pottery shard. All of the other Cannanite languages seem to have become extinct by the early 1st millennium AD.
Slightly varying forms of Hebrew preserved from the first millennium BC until modern times include:
The Phoenician and Carthaginian expansion spread the Phoenician language and its Punic dialect to the Western Mediterranean for a time, but there too it died out, although it seems to have survived slightly longer than in Phoenicia itself.