South Semitic

South Semitic is the southernmost Semitic branch, part of Afroasiatic, and comprises eastern and western arms. Old South Arabian was spoken in Yemen's caravan kingdoms and carved in stone in the angular South Arabian alphabet from the beginning of the first millennium BCE; related tongues such as Mehri persisted along the coasts of Mahra, Dhofar and Socotra.

Across the Red Sea, migrants from Arabia carried the western arm into the Horn of Africa around 800 BCE, where it became the Ethio-Semitic group. Its classical language is Ge'ez, first attested in an inscription of about 400 CE at Metera and adopted by the kings of Aksum, who made Christianity their state religion in the mid-fourth century.

The Ge'ez abugida became the script of church and state in the Ethiopian highlands, and later languages such as Amharic and Tigrinya descend from the same stock.