But nonetheless, someone who speaks French definitely cannot understand Spanish, nor vice versa. You might be familiar with Romance languages, like French and Spanish, and know that they have a lot in common: similar conjugation patterns, sentence order, vocabulary and concepts like gender. And in the Semitic language group, Amharic (Ethiopia’s official language, though not their most widely-spoken language) is spoken by many more people than Hebrew.Įuropeans and English speakers are familiar with the concept of language families.

In fact, it’s mostly dominated by Arabic, both Modern Standard Arabic and all the local versions of Arabic ( see our guide to the dialects of Arabic here). The Semitic language group is quite small. They are, after all from the same language family - Semitic languages - and have evolved in an overlapping region of the world. It’s tempting to think Arabic and Hebrew are similar because they’re related. Differences between Hebrew and Arabic (spoken).

Similarities between Hebrew and Spoken Arabic.Why think Hebrew and Arabic are similar?.

Is old hebrew read right to left