language group containing Arabic and Hebrew
Semitic is a language group that includes Arabic and Hebrew, among others. It matters because these languages are spoken by hundreds of millions of people across the Middle East, North Africa, and beyond, making it one of the world's most widely used language families.
AI-generated from the Wikipedia summary — may contain errors.
The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They include Arabic, Amharic, Tigrinya, Aramaic, Hebrew, Maltese, Modern South Arabian languages and numerous other ancient and modern languages. They are spoken by more than 460 million people across much of West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa, Malta, and in large immigrant and expatriate communities in North America, Europe, and Australasia. The terminology was first used in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen school of history, who derived the name from Shem (שם), one of the three sons of Noah in the Book of Genesis. Since the 19th century, alternative names, such as Syro-Arabian languages, have been proposed and used.
Arabic is by far the most widely spoken of the Semitic languages with 411 million native speakers of all varieties, and it is the most spoken native language in Africa and West Asia. Other Semitic languages include Amharic (35 million native speakers), Tigrinya (9.9 million speakers), Hebrew (5 million native speakers), Tigre (1 million speakers), and Maltese (570,000 speakers). Arabic, Amharic, Hebrew, Tigrinya, and Maltese are considered national languages with an official status.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).