Altaic Languages, family of languages spoken in a vast area of Eurasia, extending from Turkey in the west to the Sea of Okhotsk in the east. Most linguists describe the Altaic family of languages as consisting of three main subfamilies or groups: Turkic, Mongolian, and Tungusic. Some linguists also include in the Altaic family the Korean language, the Japanese language, and occasionally the Ainu language, spoken by a small number of people in northern Japan.

In the Middle East the principal language family is the Semitic. The largest group included is Arabic that is the liturgical language of Islam. Other Semitic languages are Hebrew and Amharic. The latter is the official language of Ethiopia, spoken by Coptic Christians and Hebrew is basically the language of the Old Testament. Semitic languages take this name from Shem, the second

Semitic Languages, one of the five subfamilies or branches of the Hamito-Semitic or Afro-Asiatic language family. Of the Semitic languages, Arabic was carried beyond its original home in the Arabian Peninsula and spread throughout the Arabian Empire and is spoken across North Africa to the Atlantic coast, and Arabic and Hebrew are used by Muslims and Jews in other parts of the world. The other Semitic languages are centered in a region bounded on the west by Ethiopia and on the north by Syria and extending southeast through Iraq and the Arab Peninsula, with some “islands” of Semitic speech farther east in Iran.

In The Languages of Africa (1963) the linguists traced the historical origin and development of African languages, and classified them into four major groups: Niger-Congo, Afro-Asiatic, Nilo-Saharan, and Khoisan. The largest language group in number of speakers, Niger-Congo, has about 300 million speakers. The second largest group, Afro-Asiatic, has about 200 million, followed by Nilo-Saharan with more than 11 million and Khoisan with about 78,000. In classifying African languages, they compared lists of basic words from a large number of languages. they also compared similarities in the forms and functions of grammatical structures. Languages belonging to the same group share certain basic vocabulary—words known as cognates—and grammatical features that trace back to a common origin. Linguists refer to this shared origin as the protolanguage or the ancestral language.

son of Noah. Shem’s brother Ham gave his name to the Hamitic languages, which seem to be distantly related to the Semitic. Semitic and Hamitic are grouped together by linguistic in one larger family called Afro-Asiatic.

Most of the languages of western Afri

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