Jonah began to enter into the city a day's journey, and he cried out, and said, "Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!"
"And he cried ..." What language did Jonah use?  Of course, no one can actually say; but since his message contains only five words in Hebrew, it could hardly have been inconvenient if he had learned it in three or four different languages!  Besides that, Aramaic, which according to Griffiths, "was a lingua franca for the educated classes, understood by Jews and Assyrians alike, as the language of diplomacy."[17]