Philistine language

Philistine
Native to	Philistia
Ethnicity	Philistines
Extinct	ca. 9th century BCE
Language family	Unclassified Indo-European?
Language codes
ISO 639-3	None (mis)
Glottolog	None

The Philistine language (/ˈfɪləstiːn/, /-staɪn/ or /fᵻˈlɪstᵻn/, /-tiːn/) is the extinct language of the Philistines, spoken—and rarely inscribed—along the coastal strip of southwestern Canaan. Very little is known about the language, of which a handful of words survive as cultural loan-words in Hebrew, describing specifically Philistine institutions, like the seranim, the "lords" of the Philistine five cities (""), or the ’argáz receptacle that occurs in 1 Samuel 6 and nowhere else, or the title padî.

There is not enough information of the language of the Philistines to relate it confidently to any other languages: possible relations to Indo-European languages, even Mycenaean Greek, support the independently-held theory that immigrant Philistines originated among "sea peoples". There are hints of non-Semitic vocabulary and onomastics, but the inscriptions, not clarified by some modern forgeries, are enigmatic: a number of inscribed miniature "anchor seals" have been found at various Philistine sites. On the other hand, evidence from the slender corpus of brief inscriptions from Iron Age IIA-IIB Tell es-Safi demonstrates that at some stage during the local Iron Age, the Philistines started using one of the branches (either Phoenician or Hebrew) of the local Canaanite language and script, which in time masked and replaced the earlier, non-local linguistic traditions, which doubtless became reduced to a linguistic substratum, for it ceased to be recorded in inscriptions. Towards the end of the Philistine settlement in the area, in the eighth to seventh centuries BCE, the primary written language in Philistia was a Canaanite dialect that was written in a version of the West Semitic alphabet so distinctive that Frank Moore Cross termed it the Neo-Philistine script. The Assyrian and Babylonian wars and occupations destroyed the Philistine presence on the coast. When documentation resumes, under the Persian imperium, it is in the Aramaic language, the empire's lingua franca.