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Western Asia, North Africa, Northeast Africa, Malta Linguistic
classification: Afro-Asiatic   • Semitic Proto-language: Proto-
Semitic ISO 639-2 / 5: sem Glottolog: semi1276[1] Approximate
historical distribution of Semitic languages. 14th century BC
diplomatic letter in Akkadian, found in Amarna, Egypt .  The
Semitic languages are a language family originating in the Near
East whose living representatives are spoken by more than 470
million people across much of Western Asia, North Africa and the
Horn of Africa, as well as in large expatriate communities in
North America and Europe. They constitute a branch of the
Afroasiatic language family. The most widely spoken Semitic
languages today are (numbers given are for native speakers only)
Arabic (300 million),[2] Amharic (21.8 million),[3] Hebrew (7
million),[4][5][6] Tigrinya (6.7 million),[7] and Aramaic
(550,000).  Semitic languages are a