Family of languages spoken throughout the
world but commonly associated with N Africa
and W Asia. It has two main branches, the
Hamitic languages of N Africa and the Semitic
languages originating in Syria, Mesopotamia,
Palestine, and Arabia, but now found from
Morocco in the west to the Arabian or Persian
Gulf in the east. The scripts of Arabic and
Hebrew are written from right to left. The
Hamitic languages include ancient Egyptian,
Coptic, and Berber, while the Semitic
languages include the largest number of
speakers - modern Arabic - and Hebrew, as
well as Aramaic and Syriac.