Family of related languages long spoken across part of western Asia and northern Africa. In antiquity these languages included Hebrew, Aramaic, and Phoenician. The most wide–spread modern member of the Semitic family is Arabic.

Semitic is an adjective which in common parlance mistakenly refers specifically to Jewish things, while the term actually refers to things originating among speakers of Semitic languages or people descended from them, and in a linguistic context to the northeastern subfamily of Afro-Asiatic.