It is critical that people think more carefully about what the term “Semitic” actually refers to, and about what does and does not constitute antisemitism.
Semitic languages are a branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family, spoken across West Asia, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa for at least 4,500 years of recorded history. They share characteristic features like triconsonantal roots (words built from typically three-consonant skeletons that take different vowel patterns to convey related meanings), nonconcatenative morphology, emphatic consonants, and VSO or SVO word order tendencies.
East Semitic
- Akkadian (extinct) — the language of ancient Assyria and Babylonia, written in cuneiform; the oldest attested Semitic language
- Eblaite (extinct) — known from the Ebla tablets in modern Syria
Northwest Semitic
Canaanite branch:
- Phoenician and its descendant Punic (extinct) — language of Carthage
- Moabite, Ammonite, Edomite (extinct)
- Samaritan (liturgical use)
Aramaic branch:
- Aramaic — once a lingua franca of the Near East, still spoken today in several forms
- Syriac — a literary and liturgical Aramaic variety
- Neo-Aramaic languages — including Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, Chaldean Neo-Aramaic, Turoyo, and Mandaic, spoken by minority communities in Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Iran, and their diasporas
Ugaritic (extinct) — known from tablets at Ras Shamra
Arabic Branch
- Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic
- The many spoken varieties often classified as separate languages: Egyptian, Levantine, Maghrebi, Gulf, Iraqi, Hejazi, Najdi, Yemeni, Sudanese, Hassaniya, Chadian Arabic, and others
- Maltese — descended from Arabic, the only Semitic language that’s an official EU language and written in Latin script
Old South Arabian (mostly extinct)
- Sabaean, Minaean, Qatabanian, Hadramautic
Modern South Arabian
Spoken in Yemen, Oman, and Socotra:
- Mehri, Soqotri, Shehri (Jibbali), Harsusi, Bathari, Hobyót
Ethiopian Semitic (spoken in Ethiopia and Eritrea)
North Ethiopic:
- Ge’ez (liturgical, extinct as a spoken language)
- Tigrinya
- Tigre
South Ethiopic:
- Amharic — the working language of Ethiopia, with tens of millions of speakers
- Harari
- Argobba
- Gurage languages (a cluster including Soddo, Mesqan, Chaha, Inor, and others)
- Zay
- Silt’e
Semitic languages are one of the most thoroughly documented in historical linguistics because of the depth of written records (Akkadian goes back to roughly the third millennium BCE), and several of these languages have been continuously written for over 2,000 years.
Arabic has by far the most Semitic speakers today, with Amharic second.
Therefore, anything anti-Arab or anti-Islam is certainly also fully anti-semitic.