The East Semitic languages are one of six fairly uncontroversial divisions of the Semitic languages, the others being Northwest Semitic, Arabian, Old South Arabian (also known as Sayhadic), Modern South Arabian, and Ethio-Semitic. The East Semitic group is attested by two distinct languages, Akkadian and Eblaite, both of which have been long extinct. They stand apart from other Semitic languages, traditionally called West Semitic, in a number of respects. Historically, it is believed that this linguistic situation came about as speakers of East Semitic languages wandered further east, settling in Mesopotamia during the third millennium BCE, as attested by Akkadian texts from this period. By the beginning of the second millennium BCE, East Semitic languages, in particular Akkadian, had come to dominate the region. They were influenced by the non-Semitic Sumerian language and adopted cuneiform writing.

Modern understanding of the phonology of East Semitic languages can only be derived from careful study of written texts and comparison with the reconstructed Proto-Semitic. Most striking is the loss of the glottal stop, or aleph, and the voiced pharyngeal fricative, or ayin, both of which are prominent features of West Semitic languages (for example, Akk. bēl 'master' < PS. *ba‘al). Also, East Semitic languages do not possess a series of three back fricatives: *h, *ḥ, *ġ. Their elision appears to give rise to the presence of an e vowel, where it is not found in other Semitic languages (for example, Akk. ekallu 'palace/temple' < PS. *haykal). It also appears that the series of interdental fricatives became sibilants (for example, Akk. šalšu 'three' < PS. *ṯalaṯ). However, the exact phonological make-up of the languages is not fully known, and the absence of features may have been the result of the inadequacies of Sumerian orthography to describe the sounds of Semitic languages rather than their real absence.

The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family originating in the Middle East. Semitic languages are spoken by more than 330 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. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by German orientalists von Schlözer and Eichhorn, who derived the name from Shem, one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis.

The most widely spoken Semitic languages today are (numbers given are for native speakers only) Arabic (300 million),Amharic (22 million),Tigrinya (7 million), and Hebrew (unknown; 5 million native and non-native L1 speakers).

Semitic languages are attested in written form from a very early date, with Akkadian and Eblaite texts (written in a script adapted from Sumerian cuneiform) appearing from around the middle of the third millennium BC in Mesopotamia and the northern Levant respectively. However, most scripts used to write Semitic languages are abjads—a type of alphabetic script that omits some or all of the vowels, which is feasible for these languages because the consonants in the Semitic languages are the primary carriers of meaning.

The term Semitic or Semite most commonly refers to the Semitic languages, a language family currently present in West Asia, North and East Africa, and Malta

Semitic may also refer to:

See also