Canaanite languages

The historical Canaanites are broadly defined to include the Hebrews (Israelites, Samaritans and Judeans), Ammonites, Edomites, Ekronites, Hyksos, Phoenicians (including the Punics/Carthaginians), Moabites, and sometimes the ethno-linguistically closely related Ugarites and Amorites.

The Canaanite languages continued to be spoken languages until at least the 5th century CE but were gradually supplanted by Aramaic, a language which gained influence as the lingua franca of the Neo-Assyrian Empire and succeeding Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenid Empires, as well as a number of other states such as the Palmyrene Empire.

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 a lingua franca for commerce between disparate diasporic communities. Samaritan Hebrew remained a liturgical language among Samaritans.

Classification

Analogous to Serbo-Croatian, the Canaanite dialects 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 (aka Assyrian and Babylonian), Eblaite, Elamite, Hurrian, Aramaic, Hittite and Old Persian.

In contrast to the Egyptians, the Bronze-Age Canaanites did not write extensively in their native language, nor in sophisticated expressive purposes like history, law codes or stories being documented.

Nonetheless, their inscriptions are heavily attested to throughout the Levant, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Northern Arabian Peninsula 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 in Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman texts.
• Hebrew – the only Canaanite language that is a living language, and the most successful example of a revived dead language hitherto only used for liturgical purposes.
• Moabite – an extinct Canaanite dialect of the Moabite people mentioned in the Bible and Assyrian and Egyptian texts. The main sources are the Mesha Stele and El-Kerak Stela.

Other

Other possible Canaanite languages:

• Eblaite (formerly), when it was first discovered in the 1970s epigraphers had classified it as "Paleo-Canaanite" or "Old Canaanite". However, subsequent linguistic scholarship after those years place it firmly as an East Semitic language.
• Ugaritic is also a closely related Northwest Semitic language of the northern Levant, but likely not Canaanitic.
• The Deir Alla inscription, written in a dialect with both 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 in Assyria and Babylonia. The Amorite text in the tablet showed very close relationship to Canaanite languages. Until then, Amorite was only known from personal names attested in Akkadian language Assyrian and Babylonian texts and its position within Northern Semitic languages was vague.