# Canaanite languages

The Canaanite languages, sometimes referred to as Canaanite dialects, are one of four subgroups of the Northwest Semitic languages. The others are Aramaic and the now-extinct Ugaritic and Amorite language. These closely related languages originated in the Levant and Upper Mesopotamia. Ancient Semitic-speaking peoples spoke them in an area encompassing what is today Israel, Palestine, Jordan, the Sinai Peninsula, Lebanon, Syria, as well as some areas of southwestern Turkey, Iraq, and the northwestern corner of Saudi Arabia. From the 9th century BCE, they also spread to the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa in the form of Phoenician.
The Canaanites are broadly defined to include the Hebrews (including Israelites, Judeans, and Samaritans), Ammonites, Edomites, Ekronites, Hyksos, Phoenicians (including the Punics/Carthaginians), Moabites, Suteans and sometimes the Ugarites and Amorites.
The Canaanite languages continued to be spoken languages until at least the 5th century but were gradually supplanted by Aramaic. Modern Hebrew is the only living Canaanite language today and was revived in the 19th century by political and cultural activists as an everyday spoken language in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This was achieved mainly through the revitalization and cultivation efforts of Zionists throughout Europe and in Palestine. By the mid-20th century, Modern Hebrew had become the primary language of Palestinian Jews and was later made the official language of the State of Israel.
Many Jews used Mishnaic Hebrew well into the Middle Ages and up to the present day as both a liturgical and literary language, and they also employed it as for commerce between disparate diasporic communities. Samaritan Hebrew remained a liturgical language among Samaritans.

## Classification

Analogous to the Romance languages, the Canaanite languages operate on a spectrum of mutual intelligibility with one another, with significant overlap occurring in syntax, morphology, phonology, and semantics. This family of languages also 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, which originated in Mesopotamia and was used to record Sumerian, Akkadian, Eblaite, Elamite, Hurrian and Hittite.
They are heavily attested in Canaanite inscriptions throughout the Levant, Mesopotamia, Anatolia and the Eastern Mediterranean, and after the founding of Carthage by Phoenician colonists, in coastal regions of North Africa and Iberian Peninsula also. Dialects have been labelled primarily with reference to Biblical geography: Hebrew (Israelian, Judean/Biblical, Samaritan), Phoenician/Punic, Amorite, Ammonite, Moabite, Sutean and Edomite; the dialects were all mutually intelligible, being no more differentiated than geographical varieties of Modern English.
The Canaanite languages or dialects can be split into the following:

### North Canaan

* Philistine – attested by several dozen inscriptions in Phoenician script scattered along Israel's southwest coast, in particular the Ekron Royal Dedicatory Inscription. It is noted as being similar to Phoenician, in particular the Byblian dialect.
* Phoenician – The main sources are the Ahiram sarcophagus inscription, the sarcophagus of Eshmunazar II, the Tabnit sarcophagus, the Kilamuwa Stela, the Cippi of Melqart, and the other Byblian royal inscriptions. There were two main dialects of Phoenician, with Byblian being confined to Byblos, and Tyro-Sidonian being spread as Phoenician settlements were founded along the Mediterranean. Tyro-Sidonian is further split into eastern and western dialects, the latter being that from which the Punic language would emerge. For later Punic: in Plautus' play Poenulus at the beginning of the fifth act.

### South Canaan

* Ammonite – an extinct Canaanite dialect of the Ammonite people mentioned in the Bible. The main sources are the Amman Citadel Inscription and Tel Siran inscription.
* Edomite – an extinct Canaanite dialect of the Edomite people mentioned in the Bible and Egyptian texts.
* Hebrew – the only Canaanite language that is a living language, and the most successful example of a revived dead language.
* Moabite – an extinct Canaanite dialect of the Moabite people mentioned in the Bible. The main sources are the Mesha Stele and El-Kerak Stela.

### Other

Other possible Canaanite languages:
* Ugaritic is possibly also a Northwest Semitic language, but likely not Canaanitic.
* The Deir Alla inscription, written in a dialect with Aramaic and South Canaanitic characteristics, which is classified as Canaanite in Hetzron.
* Sutean, a Semitic language, possibly of the Canaanite branch.
* Amarna Canaanite – attested only through the Canaano-Akkadian language of the Amarna letters. Hetzron notes that it has distinctive features that mark it as a separate language from the other Canaanite dialects rather than a direct ancestor to any of them.
* In 2022, two large, 3,800-year-old, Amorite-Akkadian bilingual tablets were published, yielding a large corpus of Northwest Semitic. The Amorite text is notably very similar to other Canaanite languages. Until then, Amorite was only known from personal names attested in Akkadian texts and its position within Northern Semitic languages was vague.

## Comparison to Aramaic

Some distinctive typological features of Canaanite in relation to the still spoken Aramaic are:
* The prefix h- is the definite article (Aramaic has a postfixed -a), which seems to be an innovation of Canaanite.
* The first person pronoun is ʼnk (אנכ anok(i), which is similar to Akkadian, Ancient Egyptian and Berber, versus Aramaic ʾnʾ/ʾny.
* The change of *ā > ō, called the Canaanite shift.

## Descendants

Modern Hebrew, 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 Samaritan Hebrew, a variety formerly spoken by the 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 Canaanite languages seem to have become extinct by the early first millennium AD except Punic, which survived into late antiquity (or possibly even longer).
Slightly varying forms of Hebrew preserved from the first millennium BC until modern times include:
* Tiberian Hebrew – Masoretic scholars living in the Jewish community of Tiberias in Palestine c. 750–950.
* Mizrahi Hebrew – Mizrahi Jews, liturgical
* Yemenite Hebrew – Yemenite Jews, liturgical
* Sephardi Hebrew – Sephardi Jews, liturgical
* Ashkenazi Hebrew – Ashkenazi Jews, liturgical
* Mishnaic Hebrew – Jews, liturgical, rabbinical, any of the Hebrew dialects found in the Talmud.
* Medieval Hebrew – Jews, liturgical, poetical, rabbinical, scientific, literary; lingua franca based on the Bible, Mishnah, and neologisms created by translators and commentators
* Haskalah Hebrew – Jews, scientific, literary and journalistic language based on Biblical but enriched with neologisms created by writers and journalists, a transition to the later
* Modern Hebrew used in Israel today
* Samaritan Hebrew – Samaritans, liturgical
The Phoenician and Punic expansion spread the Phoenician language and the Punic variety spoken in the antique-era colonies in Western Mediterranean for a time, but there too it died out, although it seems to have survived longer than in Phoenicia itself.

## Sources

The primary modern reference book for the many 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 (for a number n).