ISO 639-3 xdm | Linguist list xdm | |
Region southwestern Jordan and southern Israel. Era early 1st millennium BC Language family Afro-Asiatic
Semitic
Central Semitic
Northwest Semitic
Canaanite
Hebrew
Edomite Glottolog (insufficiently attested or not a distinct language)
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The Edomite language was a Canaanite language, very similar to Hebrew, spoken by the Edomites in southwestern Jordan and parts of Israel in the first millennium BC. It is known only from a very small corpus. In early times, it seems to have been written with a Phoenician alphabet; like the Moabite language, it retained feminine -t. However, in the 6th century BC, it adopted the Aramaic alphabet. Meanwhile, Aramaic or Arabic features such as whb ("gave") and tgr "merchant" entered the language, with whb becoming especially common in proper names.
According to Glottolog, referencing Huehnergard & Rubin (2011), Edomite was not a distinct language from Hebrew, but a Hebraic dialect.
References
Edomite language Wikipedia(Text) CC BY-SA