The Modern South Arabian (Eastern South Semitic or Eastern South Arabian) languages are spoken mainly by small populations inhabiting the Arabian Peninsula, in Yemen and Oman. Together with the modern Ethiopian Semitic languages, they form the South Semitic sub-branch of the Afro-Asiatic family's Semitic branch.

Classification

In his glottochronology-based classification, Alexander Militarev presents the Modern South Arabian languages as a South Semitic branch opposed to a North Semitic branch that includes all the other Semitic languages. They are no longer considered to be descendants of the Old South Arabian language, as was once thought, but instead "nephews".

Grammar

Modern South Arabian languages are known for their apparent archaic Semitic features, especially in their system of phonology. For example, they preserve the lateral fricatives of Proto-Semitic.

Additionally, Militarev identified a Cushitic substratum in Modern South Arabian, which he proposes is evidence that Cushitic speakers originally inhabited the Arabian Peninsula alongside Semitic speakers (Militarev 1984, 18-19; cf. also Belova 2003). According to Václav Blažek, this suggests that Semites assimilated their original Cushitic neighbours to the south who did not later emigrate to the Horn of Africa. He argues that the Levant would thus have been the Proto-Afro-Asiatic Urheimat, from where the various branches of the Afro-Asiatic family subsequently dispersed. To further support this, Blažek cites analysis of rock art in Central Arabia by Anati (1968, 180-84), which notes a connection between the shield-carrying "oval-headed" people depicted on the cave paintings and the Arabian Cushites from the Old Testament, who were similarly described as carrying specific shields.

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 South Arabian covers South Semitic languages spoken on the southern Arabian peninsula, i.e. or those originating or those which evolved from languages in south Arabia.