Why a group of digital linguists are trying to revive the long-extinct Phoenician language

In 2016, archaeologists unearthed a 3,700-year-old lice comb at an archaeological site in what is now northern Israel that would later be determined to contain the oldest inscription in the Canaanite language discovered to date.

Found at Tel El Duweir, near the Yarmuk River in Galilee, the site was once a strategic Canaanite city state. 

The comb bears a seven-word inscription in early Canaanite, which translates as “May this tusk root out the lice of the hair and the beard”.

It is significant as the first full sentence found in the Canaanite language, which itself was the first to use an alphabet as we understand it today.

While Sumerian Cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics are older, they used pictographs, not individual letters. 

Canaanite, a semitic tongue, is long extinct. With the exception of Hebrew, which was resurrected by the Zionist movement in a modern form, none of its descendants, including the ancient Phoenician language survive.

Once spoken on the Levantine coast, North African varieties descended from Phoenician, known as Punic developed with the settlement of Phoenician traders, most notably at Carthage in modern Tunisia.

That vast heritage across the region has inspired a group of amateur linguists to try to resurrect the original Phoenician dialects millennia later.

Discord servers and YouTube channels

Several notable attempts at increasing Phoenician language awareness currently exist online.

YouTube has a number of channels dedicated to Phoenician-language reconstruction, including LearnPhoenician, which is run by Algerian linguist Mohamed Amine Slimani, who even published his own dictionary.

Another is Adoon, founded in 2021 by Lebanese musicians Youssef Helayel and Tony Elk. 

From the Achaemenids to the Mughals: A look at India's lost Persian history

Read More »

The music published by Adoon blends Arabic Oud and electric guitar melodies with Phoenician poetry and features animated videos of cobblestone cities and cedarwood ships. 

Another linguistics channel, Ilovelanguages, showcases numbers, phrases and prayers in Phoenician.

One other popular outlet is the Phoenicia server on Discord, a messaging server initially used by video gamers but now also by hobby groups separated geographically but brought together online.

The server is run by two Lebanese users, named Loun and Aamunir (spelt 3amunir), whose interests are in Levantine culture.

They say their server is non-political, educational and dedicated to revitalising Phoenician, and that anyone is welcome to join.

That said, membership of the server is only through an invite link, which Loun says filters out “non-serious individuals”. 

The server has more than 863 members and is taught exclusively in English.

"We teach the language, help with reading and understanding sentences, and with how words are spoken within certain stages of the language," Loun says, adding they mostly rely on surviving inscriptions, academic papers, and “adaptive reasoning”. 

Thanks to the internet and social media, says 3amunir, Phoenician language materials are now more readily available than ever before.

Such initiatives indicate the blossoming of a niche hobby into a vibrant movement aimed at making language learning more accessible beyond academic circles.

Phoenicia and the West

Phoenician belongs to the Northwestern Canaanite branch of the Semitic family, meaning it is also related to Aramaic and Arabic, both languages spoken today in the Middle East.

In the first millennium BCE, it spread throughout the Mediterranean Sea through Phoenician expansion, but became extinct as a vernacular around the 2nd century CE. 

A significant factor was societal collapse after military defeats of Phoenicians by Alexander the Great and Rome.

In the case of Punic, after Hannibal’s campaign against Rome, which nearly resulted in its conquest, the Romans suppressed Carthaginian culture and carried out what is considered by historians to be the first documented genocide.

Nevertheless, Phoenician had already made its mark on Roman culture through Greek civilisation.

Greek myths were heavily influenced by Levantine legends and the Latin script was ultimately derived from Phoenician letters.

Phoenician therefore plays an important part in the development of western cultures.

Hobbyist scholarship and its limits

The modern day revival of Canaanite and Phoenician by amateur enthusiasts is not without its limitations.

George Handal Handal, a retired industrial electronics engineer from Palestine who owns the Star of Bethlehem Winery, exhibits Canaanite stone tablets worldwide and is a member of the Phoenicia server. 

His visits to Native American reservations inspired him to learn more about indigenous Levantine language. 

While he is critical of the lack of Arabic language instruction on the server, he says studying and translating inscriptions with the group has deepened his understanding of the Phoenician language.

He says it is important “we know at least a little about the hidden history that we don't learn in schools here in Palestine since we live under [Israeli] occupation”.

Vikings, human sacrifice and bad hygiene: Early Islamic descriptions of Russia and Ukraine

Read More »

Maroun Khreich, an associate professor at the Lebanese University, welcomes the renewed interest in Canaanite languages but cautioned that the task for hobbyists is formidable.

Khreich, who is also co-director of the Chair of Phoenician Studies at University Saint Joseph of Beirut, said incomplete records of the language reveal a very limited number of words spanning 14 centuries, making periodisation - the process of dividing its history into distinct, named chronological stages - difficult.

Any reconstruction based on existing word databases would therefore feature words from several different eras.

Khreich argues that the results of hobbyists' efforts will remain “shallow” due to the lack of a thorough academic approach.

Professor Roland Tomb, the co-founder of the Chair of Phoenician Studies, was just as critical. 

He studied Semitic languages, including Phoenician, at various European and Lebanese universities and is currently translating a Phoenician grammar book written by the late Italian scholar Maria Giulia Amadazzi Guzzo into French, English and Arabic.

Tomb said the efforts by hobbyists have “no accuracy at all because Phoenician is a dead language … transmitted by scripts, [almost] all of which are lost forever”.

This is partly because Phoenicians wrote on papyrus, a material that easily disintegrates during Lebanon's humid summers. 

Other obstacles

While the Phoenician grammar, phonology and its evolutionary stages are mostly understood, many surviving inscriptions are brief or duplicates, while others are lost.

Also complicating revitalisation efforts, Aamunir says, is that for most Lebanese, Phoenician heritage is largely symbolic.

“They teach you at school that the Phoenicians were behind the invention of the alphabet, which is a great source of pride in Lebanon, but it doesn't go beyond that… It's just a sort of slogan,” Tomb explains.

Compounding the problem, Khreich notes, is that there are very few published linguistic scholarly works on the language.

The main obstacles, however, lie in the unrecorded invisible vowels and the fact that surviving inscriptions are narrow in scope and do not cover everyday terms

Aamunir admits “we are forced to self-study to find such papers and put all the things together”. 

Despite these obstacles, our knowledge of its phonology and grammar comes from comparative analysis of surviving inscriptions of Phoenician, especially bilingual ones, to related languages, such as Hebrew, Ugaritic, and Edomite and later stages, like Punic, which slightly outlived its sister language. 

The main obstacles, however, lie in the unrecorded invisible vowels and the fact that surviving inscriptions are narrow in scope and do not cover everyday terms essential for daily conversation in the language or only mention terms once.

Based on the more than 10,000 surviving inscriptions since the 14th century, Loun says, what is certain is that the Phoenician abjad (alphabet) was purely consonantal, having no vowels, and has one of the fewest number of consonants among Semitic languages at just 22. 

Phoenician had more consonants in its older stages, but gradually reduced them to 22.

Loun describes Phoenician phonology as “very innovative” compared to other conservative nomadic languages. 

Some attested dialects include Byblos, Tyrian, and South Phoenician.

Loun believes successful language revitalisation requires more proactive efforts from governments and schools alongside grassroots initiatives. 

A glimmer of hope 

The relative success of projects for Hawaiian and Wampanoag, a Native American language, in producing new speakers show revitalisation is possible. 

Another promising trend for the project, says Loun, is that most members are under the age of 30, primarily from Lebanon, North Africa, and their related diasporas. 

Handal adds many people in Palestine are also eager to rediscover the language. 

“The Canaanite and Aramaic alphabets belong to us… the inhabitants of Palestine, because we are descendants of the Canaanites and Aramaeans,” says Handal. 

These server members do not see Phoenician as a language disconnected from their modern heritage but as an inherent part of it. 

For example, countless place names and words in Levantine Arabic are derived from Phoenician, such as "Beirut", from the term "be rut" meaning "wells", and "Baalbek", from the Canaanite deity "Baal". 

Even the word "Lebanon" itself comes from the word "lbn" meaning "white", referencing its snow-capped mountains during winter.

Khreich says that because Phoenicians are “the only culture of which Lebanon was the centre, not the periphery, it's our duty as Lebanese to preserve this culture” but revitalisation efforts must address sectarianism within Lebanese society. 

In a paper he published for a French journal, Tomb argues that while interest in Phoenician heritage in Lebanon was initially a purely Christian one, a movement called Al-Harakat al-Finiqiyya ["the Phoenician movement" in Arabic] is composed primarily of Druze and Shia Muslims.

A now-obsolete variant of Lebanese nationalism during the First World War emphasised shared Phoenician ancestry to counter sectarianism. 

Tomb compares it to similar shifts he observed during his visits to Gulf Arab states, where he was surprised to see huge investments in research on pre-Islamic Arabian heritage, and languages such as Mehri and Jiballi. 

Universities in Lebanon have already begun teaching Phoenician in French-language instruction, but as a reconstructive, archaic language (often using Punic examples).

“We already started giving courses at the universite pour tous [University for All at St Joseph University of Beirut], which is open for everybody … from all academic levels, not necessarily [just] university students,” says Khreich. 

He taught his first course last year, with a turnout of 48 students, and intends to continue.

When Tomb first taught Phoenician as an elective while dean of the Faculty of Medicine, he says more than a hundred students enrolled each year. 

Aside from the University for All, the Lebanese University, and formerly the American University in Beirut, have offered courses, both of which Khreich taught. 

More recently, Tomb’s friend from the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes (Practical School of Higher Studies) in Paris, Professor Robert Hawley, also taught the language. 

Tomb says universities actively collaborate to avoid “closed systems”. He adds that motivations among his students vary, ranging from pure curiosity to historical or political interest.

The youth-led digital movement to revitalise Phoenician, whether through Discord or YouTube, indicates renewed interest in the region's indigenous languages, albeit with a mixed reception and practical obstacles. 

Loun and 3amunir hope that someday, Phoenicia server members, such as Handal, will teach the language themselves.