Claim: Semitic languages are spoken by more than 330 million people.

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 often large expatriate communities in North America and Europe , with smaller communities in the Caucasus and Central Asia . The terminology was first used in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen School of History , 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 -LRB- numbers given are for native speakers only -RRB- Arabic -LRB- 300 million -RRB- , Amharic -LRB- 22 million -RRB- , Tigrinya -LRB- 7 million -RRB- , Hebrew -LRB- unknown ; 5 million native and non-native L1 speakers -RRB- , Tigre -LRB- 1.05 million in 2006 -RRB- , Aramaic -LRB- 575,000 to 1 million largely Assyrian fluent speakers -RRB- and Maltese -LRB- 520,000 speakers -RRB- .   Semitic languages occur in written form from a very early historical date , with East Semitic Akkadian and Eblaite texts -LRB- written in a script adapted from Sumerian cuneiform -RRB- appearing from the 29th century BCE and the 25th century BCE in Mesopotamia and the northern Levant respectively . The only earlier attested written languages are Sumerian , Elamite -LRB- both language isolates -RRB- and Egyptian . However , most scripts used to write Semitic languages are abjadsa 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 .   Among them are the Ugaritic , Phoenician , Aramaic , Hebrew , Syriac , Arabic , and South Arabian alphabets . The Ge'ez script , used initially in Yemen , and later also for writing the Semitic languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea , is technically an abugida a modified abjad in which vowels are notated using diacritic marks added to the consonants at all times , in contrast with other Semitic languages which indicate diacritics based on need or for introductory purposes . Maltese is the only Semitic language written in the Latin script and the only Semitic language to be an official language of the European Union .   The Semitic languages are notable for their nonconcatenative morphology . That is , word roots are not themselves syllables or words , but instead are isolated sets of consonants -LRB- usually three , making a so-called triliteral root -RRB- . Words are composed out of roots not so much by adding prefixes or suffixes , but rather by filling in the vowels between the root consonants -LRB- although prefixes and suffixes are often added as well -RRB- . For example , in Arabic , the root meaning `` write '' has the form k-t-b . From this root , words are formed by filling in the vowels and sometimes adding additional consonants , e.g. كتاب kitāb `` book '' , كتب kutub `` books '' , كاتب kātib `` writer '' , كتّاب kuttāb `` writers '' , كتب kataba `` he wrote '' , يكتب yaktubu `` he writes '' , etc. .