Modern Hebrew is the only living Canaanite language today and was revived in the 19th century by political and cultural activists as an everyday spoken language in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This was achieved mainly through the revitalization and cultivation efforts of Zionists throughout Europe and in Palestine. By the mid-20th century, Modern Hebrew had become the primary language of Palestinian Jews and was later made the official language of the State of Israel.
In contrast to the Egyptians, the Bronze-Age Canaanites did not write extensively in their native language, nor in sophisticated expressive purposes like history, law codes or stories being documented.
The Canaanite languages or dialects can be split into the following:
North Canaan
Philistine – attested by several dozen inscriptions in Phoenician script scattered along Israel's southwest coast, in particular the Ekron Royal Dedicatory Inscription. It is noted as being similar to Phoenician, in particular the Byblian dialect.
Edomite – an extinct Canaanite dialect of the Edomite people mentioned in the Bible and in Assyrian, Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman texts.
Hebrew – the only Canaanite language that is a living language, and the most successful example of a revived dead language hitherto only used for liturgical purposes.
Eblaite (formerly), when it was first discovered in the 1970s epigraphers had classified it as "Paleo-Canaanite" or "Old Canaanite". However, subsequent linguistic scholarship after those years place it firmly as an East Semitic language.
Ugaritic is also a closely related Northwest Semitic language of the northern Levant, but likely not Canaanitic.
Sutean, a Semitic language, possibly of the Canaanite branch.
Amarna Canaanite – attested only through the Canaano-Akkadian language of the Amarna letters. Hetzron notes that it has distinctive features that mark it as a separate language from the other Canaanite dialects rather than a direct ancestor to any of them.
In 2022, two large, 3,800-year-old, Amorite-Akkadian bilingual tablets were published, yielding a large corpus of Northwest Semitic in Assyria and Babylonia. The Amorite text in the tablet showed very close relationship to Canaanite languages. Until then, Amorite was only known from personal names attested in Akkadian language Assyrian and Babylonian texts and its position within Northern Semitic languages was vague.
Modern Hebrew, revived in the modern era from an extinct dialect of the ancient Israelites preserved in literature, poetry, liturgy; also known as Classical Hebrew, the oldest form of the language attested in writing. The original pronunciation of Biblical Hebrew is accessible only through reconstruction. It may also include Samaritan Hebrew, a variety formerly spoken by the Samaritans. The main sources of Classical Hebrew are the Hebrew Bible and inscriptions such as the Gezer calendar and Khirbet Qeiyafa ostracon. All of the other Canaanite languages seem to have become extinct by the early first millennium CE except Punic, which survived into late antiquity (or possibly even longer).
Slightly varying forms of Hebrew preserved from the first millennium BC until modern times include:
Mishnaic Hebrew – Jews, liturgical, rabbinical, any of the Hebrew dialects found in the Talmud.
Medieval Hebrew – Jews, liturgical, poetical, rabbinical, scientific, literary; lingua franca based on the Bible, Mishnah, and neologisms created by translators and commentators
Haskalah Hebrew – Jews, scientific, literary and journalistic language based on Biblical but enriched with neologisms created by writers and journalists, a transition to the later
The primary modern reference book for the many extra-biblical Canaanite inscriptions, together with Aramaic inscriptions, is the German-language book Kanaanäische und Aramäische Inschriften which draws together a large corpus of written material from Levant, Mesopotamia and Anatolia, from which inscriptions are often referenced as KAI n (for a number n).
↑Glinert, Lewis (2018). The story of Hebrew. Library of Jewish ideas (First paperback printinged.). Princeton: Princeton University Press. ISBN978-0-691-18309-1. By 1936, only "one-third of Palestine's 300,000 Jews could not communicate in Hebrew"; "
↑Sanders, Seth L. (2011). The Invention of Hebrew. University of Illinois Press. p.90. ISBN978-0-252-07835-4. By contrast with the abundant Amarna letters, brimming with language and politics, we are hard pressed to find a single complete sentence in the alphabetic texts of Late Bronze Age Canaan.
↑Waltke & O'Connor (1990:8): "The extrabiblical linguistic material from the Iron Age is primarily epigraphic, that is, texts written on hard materials (pottery, stones, walls, etc.). The epigraphic texts from Israelite territory are written in Hebrew in a form of the language which may be called Inscriptional Hebrew; this 'dialect' is not strikingly different from the Hebrew preserved in the Masoretic text. Unfortunately, it is meagerly attested. Similarly limited are the epigraphic materials in the other South Canaanite dialects, Moabite and Ammonite; Edomite is so poorly attested that we are not sure that it is a South Canaanite dialect, though that seems likely. Of greater interest and bulk is the body of Central Canaanite inscriptions, those written in the Phoenician language of Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos, and in the offshoot Punic and Neo-Punic tongues of the Phoenician colonies in North Africa.
"An especially problematic body of material is the Deir Alla wall inscriptions referring to a prophet Balaam (c. 700 BC), these texts have both Canaanite and Aramaic features. W. R. Garr has recently proposed that all the Iron Age Canaanite dialects be regarded as forming a chain that actually includes the oldest forms of Aramaic as well."
↑Gitin, Dothan, and Naveh, 1997, p. 15, quote: "If so, one may ask why should a seventh century BCE inscription be written at Ekron in a language close to Phoenician and reminiscent of Old Byblian. Phoenician was the prestige language in the tenth and ninth century BCE. To find an inscription, however, in seventh century BCE Philistia, where a script from the Hebrew tradition was used, is something of an enigma."
↑Rubin, Aaron (2008-01-01). "The subgrouping of the Semitic languages". Language and Linguistics Compass. doi:10.1111/J.1749-818X.2007.00044.X. Soon after its discovery, claims were made that Eblaite was an early form of Northwest Semitic. Since then, more careful study has shown that Eblaite should instead be classified as East Semitic, as it shares a number of innovative morphological isoglosses with Akkadian.
Waltke, Bruce K.; O'Connor, M. (1990). An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax. Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns. ISBN978-0-931464-31-7.
Further reading
Dallaire, Hélène M. The Syntax of Volitives in Biblical Hebrew and Amarna Canaanite Prose. University Park, USA: Penn State University Press, 2014. doi:10.1515/9781575064000
Izre'el, Shlomo. "Canaano-Akkadian: Linguistics and Sociolinguistics". In: Language and Nature. Papers Presented to John Huehnergard on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday. hrsg. v. Rebecca Hasselbach, Na'ama Pat-El (Studies in Ancient Oriental Civilization (SAOC) 67). Chicago, IL: Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2012. pp.171–218. ISBN978-1-885923-91-2.
Pat-El, Na’ama; Wilson-Wright, Aren (2016). "The Features of Canaanite: A Reevaluation". Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft. 166 (1): 41–55. doi:10.13173/zeitdeutmorggese.166.1.0041. Accessed 18 May 2023.
