| Central Semitic | |
| Region: | Middle East |
| Familycolor: | Afro-Asiatic |
| Fam2: | Semitic |
| Fam3: | West Semitic |
| Child1: | Northwest Semitic |
| Child2: | Arabic (including Maltese) |
| Glotto: | cent2236 |
| Glottorefname: | Central Semitic |
Central Semitic languages[1] [2] are one of the three groups of West Semitic languages, alongside Modern South Arabian languages and Ethiopian Semitic languages.
Central Semitic can itself be further divided into two groups: Arabic and Northwest Semitic. Northwest Semitic languages largely fall into the Canaanite languages (such as Phoenician and Hebrew) and Aramaic.
Distinctive features of Central Semitic languages include the following:[3]
Different classification systems disagree on the precise structure of the group. The most common approach divides it into Arabic and Northwest Semitic, while SIL Ethnologue has South Central Semitic (including Arabic and Hebrew) vs. Aramaic.
The main distinction between Arabic and the Northwest Semitic languages is the presence of broken plurals in the former. The majority of Arabic nouns (apart from participles) form plurals in this manner, whereas virtually all nouns in the Northwest Semitic languages form their plurals with a suffix. For example, the Arabic بَيْت bayt ("house") becomes بُيُوت buyūt ("houses"); the Hebrew בַּיִת bayit ("house") becomes בָּתִּים bāttīm ("houses").