Languages Spoken In the Middle East

Understanding languages spoken in other parts of the world is essential to understanding their culture. The purpose of this project is to educate on the basic components of middle eastern languages.

Arabic: Modern Arabic belongs to the Semitic language family. Semitic languages have a history recorded back thousands of years. While the origins of the Semitic language family are currently in dispute among scholars, there is agreement that they originated in the Mediterranean Basin area, especially in the Tigris-Euphrates river basin and in the coastal areas of the Levant.The Semitic language family is a descendant of “proto-Semitic”—an ancient language that was exclusively spoken and has no written record. While a majority of the many other Semitic languages are now considered “dead” languages, either entirely obsolete or used only in religious practice, Arabic has flourished. The reason for this is inextricably linked with the rise of Islam and, more specifically, Islam’s holy book, the Qur’an.

Turkish: Turkish is a very ancient language and belongs to the Altaic branch of the Ural-Altaic family of languages. As one of the most widely spoken languages in the world, it is spoken by almost 65 million people in Turkey and over a large geographical area in Europe and Asia.

Hebrew: Hebrew is one of a large group of languages, called `Semitic', spoken throughout the Middle East and North Africa. The name was first used as late as 1781 by a German scholar. He wanted to subdivide languages into related groups according to their similarities, and he named them after the three people: the sons of Noah. One of them, Shem, whose name is the origin of `Semitic', was the father of Eber. Eber's name is given in the Bible as the origin of `Hebrew'. Semitic languages are spoken in three main geographic regions. Northwest Semitic covers Israel and its neighbors, including Hebrew from Israel, Canaanite spoken by its earlier inhabitants, Phoenician from the coastal region to the north of Haifa, Ugaritic to the north of that, and a group of languages to the east including Edomite, Ammonite and Moabite. Hebrew, and several other languages, survived in scholarly or literary use long after they ceased to be spoken for everyday purposes.

Kurdish: Kurdish is the language of more than twenty million Kurds living in a vast unbroken territory.
Kurdish belongs to the family of Indo-European languages and to the Irano-Aryan group of this family.
The Iranophone tribes and peoples of Central Asia and of the bordering territories begin moving towards the Iranian plateau and the littoral steppes of the Black sea at the turning point of the second and first millennium B.C. As these tribes and peoples invade the area, they give their language and their name to other Irano-aryan peoples already present on the land. Even today there are fairly large pockets of non-Kurdophone Kurds living in Kurdistan of Turkey, of Iran and of Iraq.